Anthropic Says Alibaba Cloned Claude 29 Million Times. Alibaba Denies It. Here’s What’s Real.

Anthropic Says Alibaba Cloned Claude 29 Million Times. Alibaba Denies It. Here’s What’s Real.

In a June 10 letter to US senators — surfaced publicly in late June — Anthropic accused operators affiliated with Alibaba and its Qwen AI lab of the largest known “distillation attack” on Claude: 28.8 million exchanges through roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts over six weeks. Alibaba denies wrongdoing. The figures are Anthropic’s allegation and have not been independently verified. Yesterday we covered Meta’s fear of distillation from the inside; today, the same technique appears as a US-China national-security flashpoint. gafam.ai separates what is claimed from what is established — and reads the European consequence.

Meta Just Banned Its Own Engineers From the Best AI Coding Tools. The Reason Is Revealing.

Meta Just Banned Its Own Engineers From the Best AI Coding Tools. The Reason Is Revealing.

Internal Meta documents reviewed by The Information reveal that the company has restricted its engineers from using Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex — and even paused some tasks entirely. The reason is not cost. It is fear of “distillation”: that outputs from rival models could seep into Meta’s own training data and contaminate its Llama models, triggering what an internal memo called “serious escalations with partner companies.” It is a rare, revealing glimpse into how zero-sum the frontier AI race has become. gafam.ai’s European analysis.