Conceptual diagram of AI Photo: VCG

US AI company Anthropic accused Chinese technology and e-commerce giant Alibaba of illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities in what it described as the largest known "distillation" attack on the company, Reuters reported on Thursday.

This is not the first time that Anthropic has accused a Chinese tech company of data theft this year. A Chinese expert said the allegations reflect technological hegemony anxiety and are intended to hinder China's AI advancement, adding that innovation requires openness and collaboration, while Anthropic is using litigation to build barriers and maintain its monopoly.

According to a letter seen by Reuters, Anthropic claimed that distillation is a way to help accelerate China's ability to reach Anthropic's advanced Mythos ⁠Preview capabilities. It further claimed the campaign was conducted by operators affiliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba's AI lab. 

Alibaba had not responded to the Global Times' request for comment as of press time.

Notably, according to Wall Street Journal's report on February 23, Anthropic claimed that three Chinese AI companies - DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax - set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up. It accused the three companies prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic's system to train and improve their own products, Anthropic said in a blog post Monday.

The allegations reflect a strategy driven by technological hegemony anxiety and are intended to curb China's technological advancement, the expert said, calling them a "kick away the ladder" tactic in the AI race, Tian Feng, former dean of SenseTime's Intelligence Industry Research Institute, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Tian noted that distillation is a widely adopted model compression technique across the AI industry, while Chinese companies have advanced through lawful data sources and algorithm optimization under a compliant framework.

Ironically, while accusing others of data theft, Anthropic itself has been accused of systematically misappropriating training data.

"Anthropic is guilty of stealing training data at massive scale and has had to pay multi-billion dollar settlements for their theft. This is just a fact," xAI CEO Elon Musk shared a post on X on February 23 regarding Anthropic's accusations of so-called distillation attacks by three Chinese AI companies.

Anthropic last year agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the AI company of using their books to train its AI chatbot Claude without permission, according to Reuters' another report on September 5, 2025.

"This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong," the authors' lawyers said in a statement, the report said, noted that they called it the largest copyright recovery in history and the first of its kind in the artificial intelligence era.

By stigmatizing competitors, the company is seeking to divert attention from its own history of data misuse, while Chinese companies have advanced through compliant innovation, Tian said. The debate over "distillation" also highlights the urgent need for a global AI governance framework that distinguishes legitimate technological innovation from malicious infringement, underscoring why international cooperation remains essential for AI development, he added.

US AI companies have repeatedly targeted Chinese tech startups this year, with allegations of "theft" becoming a recurring narrative. Governments and companies have even invoked "national security" to justify such actions, experts noted.

According to Bloomberg, OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and Alphabet Inc.'s Google have begun working together to try to clamp down on Chinese competitors extracting results from cutting-edge US artificial intelligence models to gain an edge in the global AI race.

The rare collaboration underscores the severity of a concern raised by US AI companies that some users, especially in China, are creating imitation versions of their products that could undercut them on price and siphon away customers while posing a "national security risk," the report claimed.

A White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum released on April 23 claimed the US government had information indicating that "foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems."

China has already made its position clear on the US' smears and baseless accusations against China's AI achievements.

"Such allegations are groundless and are deliberate attacks on China's development and progress in the AI industry. China firmly rejects it. We urge the US to respect facts, discard bias, stop its containment on China's sci-tech development and choose the course of action conducive to sci-tech exchanges and cooperation between China and the US," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on April 24, responding to the White House's accusations that China had engaged in industrial-scale theft of American AI intellectual property.