Artificial intelligence companies in the US have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to develop more advanced chatbots, betting they can earn enough from customers to justify the investment. That approach carries the risk of being undermined by rivals who build competing AI systems for far less.

America's powerful AI models are deemed national security assets, with China accused of stealing them through "distillation."

Anthropic alleged that Alibaba-affiliated operators used nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to generate 28.8 million Claude exchanges.

Anthropic sent a letter to the White House and several U.S. senators this week, alleging an industrial-scale effort by Alibaba to access its Claude models, according to a Seeking Alpha report. The accusation landed four days after Alibaba sued the Pentagon over an unrelated blacklist designation,

The letter, which was obtained by CNBC, claims Alibaba carried out "the largest known distillation attack on Anthropic to date."

Anthropic accused the Chinese tech giant Alibaba of “brazenly” and “illicitly” trying to extract its artificial intelligence capabilities – carrying out “the largest known distillation attack on Anthropic to date.