Anthropic’s AI Theft Accusations Rattle Alibaba, Shares Sink to 16-Month Low

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd shares fell to a 16-month low in Hong Kong after US artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic accused the Chinese technology giant of orchestrating a large-scale effort to gain unauthorized access to its Claude AI models.

Bloomberg (BBG) reported the allegations citing Anthropic's letter to US senators and White House officials. The matter has intensified concerns over competition in the global AI sector and has added to the mounting scrutiny faced by Chinese technology firms from Washington.

Anthropic Claims Large-Scale Access Attempts

Anthropic alleged that individuals linked to Alibaba’s Qwen AI laboratory created nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts and conducted around 28.8 million interactions with Claude between April and June.

The AI company claimed the campaign was aimed at extracting some of Claude’s most advanced capabilities, including software engineering and agentic reasoning functions.

Anthropic argued that Chinese AI developers are increasingly relying on a technique known as adversarial distillation, through which outputs from advanced AI models are used to train competing systems at significantly lower cost.

"These distillation attacks are carried out illicitly, systematically, and at industrial scale to harvest US Al capabilities across frontier labs and repackage them as their own without incurring the training and R&D costs required to train US frontier models," Anthropic wrote in its letter, as per BBG.

Alibaba reportedly declined to comment on the allegations. Anthropic also did not provide further details but stressed the need for coordinated action between governments and industry to address the issue.

Alibaba Shares Extend Decline

Investor reaction was swift. Alibaba's shares dropped as much as 4.9% in Hong Kong on Thursday, pushing the stock to its lowest level in 16 months and extending its decline for the year to roughly 33%.

The weakness was not limited to Alibaba. Shares of other Chinese AI-focused companies also came under pressure, with Xiaomi Corp. and Baidu Inc. each falling more than 3%, as per BBG.

Growing Political and Regulatory Pressure

The dispute comes amid broader efforts in Washington to curb unauthorised use of US-developed AI technologies. Lawmakers are considering measures that could sanction or blacklist Chinese companies found to be improperly using outputs from American AI models to train rival systems.

The White House’s prohibition on foreign access to Anthropic’s flagship Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models signals a shift toward a more aggressive US regulatory posture on AI, said Robert Lea, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.

Alibaba is already facing political pressure in the US after being placed on a Pentagon blacklist earlier this month over alleged links to China’s military, a designation the company has denied and challenged in court.

Anthropic has also called for stronger information-sharing among US technology companies and continued export controls on advanced AI chips. The company warned that failing to address large-scale distillation efforts could narrow the technological gap between the US and China and raise national security concerns.