Anthropic Accuses Alibaba's Qwen Lab of Largest-Ever Claude Distillation Campaign — 25,000 Fake Accounts, 28.8M Chats

CNBC·high signal

In a June 24 letter to US senators and the White House, Anthropic alleged that operators tied to Alibaba's Qwen lab ran roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to conduct 28.8 million Claude interactions between April 22 and June 5, specifically harvesting software-engineering and agentic-reasoning capabilities. It is the first time Anthropic has named a major Chinese conglomerate, and the campaign alone exceeds the combined ~16M exchanges it previously attributed to DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot. The accusation lands amid US export controls restricting Chinese access to Anthropic's Mythos and Fable 5 models.