Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei attends a working lunch on innovation and AI with G7 leaders, G7 outreach partners, and global technology CEOs during the G7 Summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, on June 17, 2026.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Anthropic sends letter to U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee condemning Chinese tech companies alibaba CNBC acknowledged Wednesday that it had “brazenly” and “illegally” attempted to extract artificial intelligence capabilities.
The letter, sent on June 10 to Sens. Tim Scott (South Carolina) and Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), said Alibaba had launched “the largest distillation attack ever known on Anthropic.”
Distillation is an AI training method that uses the output from an existing, more powerful model to build a smaller, less powerful model.
Anthropic said operators affiliated with Alibaba and its AI lab used approximately 25,000 fraudulent accounts to conduct 28.8 million exchanges with its models between April 22 and June 5, according to a letter seen by CNBC.
“We believe combating the threat of illegal distillation requires coordinated government and industry action, and we will continue to work with Congress and the administration to maintain America’s AI leadership,” an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement.
A representative for Alibaba did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Bloomberg first reported the letter.
The letter comes two months after the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a memorandum pledging to help AI companies detect and adjust for industrial-scale distillation. Anthropic wrote that Alibaba “ignored the Trump administration’s warnings” in moving forward with its distillation attack.
In February, Anthropic announced it had identified three “industrial-scale” distillation campaigns from three other AI labs: DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax. The company said in a blog post at the time that its campaigns were increasing in intensity and sophistication and were encouraging collaboration between the AI industry, cloud providers and policymakers.
But in recent weeks, Anthropic’s work with policymakers has become complicated.
The company announced earlier this month that it had received an export control order from the Trump administration ordering it to stop access to its latest Claude models, the Fable 5 and Mythos 5, “by foreign nationals, including foreign Anthropic employees, whether in the United States or abroad.”
Anthropic said the government cited “national security authorities” but did not specify its concerns.
Senior staff members flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of the Trump administration over the next few days. The company told CNBC that “both parties are working quickly to resolve this issue,” but has not yet said when its models will be back online.
–CNBC’s Kate Rooney contributed to this report
Attention: Anthropic to meet with Trump administration over mythology controversy
