Alibaba accounts ran 151 million Claude exchanges, Anthropic's biggest distillation claim yet

Anthropic said on Thursday that accounts linked to Alibaba made more than 151 million exchanges with its Claude models between May and July 2026, the largest effort it has ever seen to illicitly replicate the capabilities of a US frontier model.

The claim is the focus of Anthropic’s Threat Intelligence Report for September 2026, which describes activity the company says it identified and terminated between December 2025 and August 2026.

The Alibaba campaign was the biggest of five separate distillation efforts that Anthropic said it linked to China-based AI firms.

3,500 accounts shared one fixed prompt to extract reasoning

The traffic Anthropic traced to Alibaba was distributed among 3,500 accounts and peaked at close to three million exchanges in a single day. Thousands of accounts could look like unrelated users on their own.

Anthropic said it linked them because each used the same fixed prompt to get reasoning out of Claude, which the company viewed as one unified effort to generate training data for Alibaba’s Qwen family of models.

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