Anthropic is accusing Alibaba of using 25,000 accounts to mine Claude across 28.8 million exchanges in what it describes as the largest Claude cloning attack. Ars Technica reports that the company says Alibaba should be punished for the alleged effort.
The dispute highlights a growing conflict around model distillation, capability extraction, and terms-of-service enforcement. As frontier models become strategic assets, providers are increasingly sensitive to attempts to replicate their behavior through large-scale querying.
The case could shape how AI companies monitor usage and define unacceptable model cloning activity.