Jason Chow

Pro's number one most trusted app, based on August 2025 proprietary survey.

So distillation is simply the process of training AI models by learning from the responses of another, usually more advanced model to replicate their capabilities.

And so Anthropic is accusing Alibaba and its AI lab, Quinn, of training their model on Anthropic's cloud model illicitly.

Yes.

So in the letter, Anthropic said that they found that Alibaba created almost 25,000 fake accounts to access Claude, and that involved nearly 29 million exchanges.

between late April and early June this year.

And so they're accusing Alibaba of targeting some of Claude's most valuable capabilities.

So that includes agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long horizon tasks, which are some of the most difficult tasks that an AI model can perform.

Yes.

So American AI labs, and that's not just anthropic, you know, open AI as well, for example, have accused Chinese AI labs of

of accessing their models and training Chinese models on American frontier models without permission.

And so that's been signaled to the Trump administration before.

The White House has issued a memorandum earlier this year, sort of warning Chinese organizations of creating these proxy accounts and then using all types of jailbreaking techniques to distill American models.

And they've already said that's unacceptable.

But we haven't seen sort of further, more severe sanctions or penalties that's been imposed to some of these Chinese firms.

In a way, Chinese AI labs are roughly about, depending on who you ask, roughly about six months to at most a year behind American labs.

And that gap is widely considered to be shrinking.

And I probably guess said that it's a priority for them to make sure that the Chinese AI models do not surpass China.

American models.

And this is the latest sort of escalation of those tensions.