Artificial intelligence major Anthropic has accused Alibaba (HKG:9988) of "illicitly" accessing its Claude model to train its Qwen AI model, according to a June 10 letter to US lawmakers, which was recently made public.
The letter, addressed to Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Alibaba carried out "the largest known distillation attack on Anthropic to date."
Anthropic claimed that Alibaba's Qwen AI used thousands of fraudulent accounts to piggyback on Claude's "most valuable capabilities," including software engineering and agentic reasoning capabilities.
The firm asked the lawmakers to facilitate threat information sharing between U.S. AI labs and close loopholes that allow Chinese entities access to advanced U.S. chips.
Anthropic blocked Chinese entities' access to Claude AI last year citing "legal, regulatory, and security risks."
Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment from.
Shares of Alibaba fell nearly 5% in recent trade in Hong Kong.