Investing.com -- Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA) shares slid 3% on Wednesday following reports that AI startup Anthropic has accused the Chinese tech giant of illicitly scraping its Claude AI models.

According to a letter sent by Anthropic to US senators and White House officials, operators linked to Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab launched a massive, coordinated campaign to bypass restrictions using thousands of fraudulent accounts. Anthropic characterized the incident as the largest known attempt by a Chinese company to exploit a leading US AI lab.

The letter, first reported by Bloomberg News, detailed a massive operation targeting Anthropic’s intellectual property:

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  Timeline: April through June.

  
  


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  Volume: 28.8 million exchanges with the Claude model.

  
  


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  Infrastructure: Executed via nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts.

  
  


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  Pattern: Anthropic noted the campaign mirrors similar illicit scraping attempts by other Chinese developers flagged earlier this year.

  
  

Anthropic warned US policymakers that Alibaba and other Chinese labs are systematically harvesting data from top-tier US AI models. This practice—known as adversarial distillation—allows foreign competitors to train rival chatbots at a fraction of the cost. Furthermore, Anthropic raised alarms that AI systems cloned through this method frequently lack critical safety guardrails.

"These attacks are carried out illicitly, systematically, and at industrial scale to harvest US AI capabilities across frontier labs and repackage them as their own without incurring the training and R&D costs," Anthropic wrote in its letter to the Trump administration.

Because Anthropic explicitly blocks its products from being accessed in China, the alleged campaign represents a severe violation of its distribution and terms of service policies. The startup has urged Washington to implement stricter guardrails to halt the practice.