Anthropic accuses Chinese rival Alibaba of illicitly extracting AI capabilities

US Artificial Intelligence (AI) giant Anthropic has accused Chinese e-commerce and technology firm Alibaba of "brazenly" and "illicitly" extracting its Claude AI model's capabilities.In a letter sent to two members of the US Congress, the San Francisco-based company said operators linked to Alibaba carried out almost 29 million exchanges with Claude using thousands of fraudulent accounts in what it called the largest extraction campaign of its kind.Anthropic urged Congress to penalise the companies behind attacks like this and to ramp up measures to prevent US tech from being stolen.The BBC has contacted Alibaba for comment and requested more details from Anthropic.Anthropic's letter, dated 10 June and addressed to US Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, accused New York Stock Exchange-listed Alibaba of carrying out "the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude's capabilities".According to Anthropic, the campaign was carried out through what are known as "distillation attacks", which extracted answers from a stronger AI model to train a weaker one.Alibaba-linked operators targeted Claude's most valuable capabilities, including its ability to tackle longer and more complex tasks and its approach to decision-making, Anthropic said.These type of attacks are carried out on an "industrial scale" to enable Chinese companies to harvest and repackage US AI capabilities as their own, the company said.