Shares of Alibaba (HK:9988) traded on the Hong Kong stock exchange dropped on Thursday following reports that US-based AI startup Anthropic accused the company of extensive attempts to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude artificial intelligence models.
By 5:40 AM, the shares had declined by 5% to HK$94.55, reaching their lowest point since February 2025. The company’s American-listed shares closed 3% lower on Wednesday.
According to a letter sent by Anthropic to US senators and White House officials, operators linked to Alibaba’s AI lab Qwen orchestrated a large-scale coordinated campaign to bypass restrictions using thousands of fraudulent accounts.
The letter, first reported by Bloomberg News, indicates that between April 22 and June 5, the campaign generated over 28.8 million interactions with Claude through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts.
Anthropic claims that the aim of this activity was to extract advanced model capabilities for subsequent use in improving competing AI systems.
As reported, Anthropic alleges that operators associated with Alibaba and its Qwen unit carried out the largest known “distillation” campaign against the company.
Distillation is a widely used AI development technique in which a less powerful model is trained based on the outputs of a more capable one.
The accusations come amid increasing scrutiny by US authorities of China’s access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies.
This conflict highlights the growing competition between American and Chinese AI companies, which are heavily investing in the development of increasingly powerful generative AI systems and seeking to safeguard their proprietary technologies.
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