Anthropic says Alibaba must be punished for largest Claude cloning attack

Anthropic accused Alibaba of “brazenly” racing to make a copycat Claude, seemingly unfazed by Trump’s threats to crack down on foreign efforts to copy US frontier models despite depending on US investors. “Alibaba is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, maintains business operations in the United States, and is accountable to US investors and regulators,” Anthropic’s letter noted, “yet this activity unfolded in the weeks after” Trump’s memo warned that cloning attempts were “unacceptable.” Ars could not immediately reach Alibaba for comment. Alibaba is already preparing to clash with Trump, though. In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, Alibaba accused the Trump administration of blacklisting the company after falsely linking the company to the Chinese military, Reuters reported. Alibaba is seeking to remove the Trump designation, which they claimed has “no basis in fact or law.” “Alibaba is governed by an independent board, none of whom has any military affiliation,” Alibaba said. “Its products and services are built for retail, logistics, and enterprise information technology—not weapons, defense, or intelligence.” Anthropic appears unconvinced, however, that Alibaba isn’t working with the Chinese government. In the letter, Anthropic warned that without stronger interventions, these distillation attacks will “help China reach Mythos Preview-level capabilities sooner.” To keep the US ahead of China, Anthropic recommended that Congress pass legislation with three objectives. First, antitrust laws must be updated to allow AI firms to share information about evolving Chinese tactics to deter more threats. Second, the US needs more export controls on chips to hamstring Chinese access to advanced compute so that they simply can’t train on US model outputs. That could make conducting distillation attacks pointless, Anthropic suggested. Finally, Congress should pass laws penalizing Chinese labs’ “bad behavior” so that it’s “more difficult and costly” to rely on distillation attacks to advance Chinese models. Penalties could include limiting Chinese firms from accessing US models or advanced US chips or from relying on data centers outside of China, Anthropic suggested. Anthropic declined to clarify whether Alibaba’s alleged attacks were significant enough to help meaningfully accelerate China’s AI capabilities or comment on any specific steps taken to thwart the attacks. Instead, a spokesperson provided a statement to Ars, echoing sentiments expressed in the letter to senators. “We believe combating the threat of illicit distillation requires coordinated action between government and industry, and we will continue working with Congress and the Administration to maintain American AI leadership,” Anthropic said. Anthropic’s suspicions that China is racing to build models to match Claude’s capabilities have been confirmed by at least one major Chinese tech founder. At a cybersecurity conference in Beijing yesterday, 360 Security Technology founder Zhou Hongyi likened Anthropic’s Mythos to a “cyber nuclear weapon,” the South China Morning Post reported. Zhou told the audience that Mythos’ sudden giant leap in its ability to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities was a “terrifying change” that had effectively “democratized” cyberattacks, SCMP reported. For China, having no access to Mythos was a significant disadvantage, Zhou said. He bemoaned that Project Glasswing, which granted more than 40 US organizations access to Mythos Preview to strengthen cyber defenses, excluded China. “This means US organizations can use Mythos to scan your vulnerabilities, but you don’t even have the qualification to catch a glimpse of Mythos,” Zhou said. China’s only way forward is to create its own Mythos-like model, Zhou said, warning that such a “game-changing weapon in cyber warfare” cannot “be held solely in the hands of others.” According to Zhou, China must race to copy Mythos’ capabilities so that there’s mutually assured destruction should its rival attempt to seize gains using its advanced AI. SCMP noted that “Zhou’s remarks marked the first time a prominent Chinese technology founder has publicly warned about the strategic risks posed by the US frontier AI model.” Right now, Zhou said that Chinese firms are “well short of Mythos-level capabilities,” SCMP reported. He then positioned his own company as developing a solution, which focuses “on AI agent systems that combined existing foundation models with specialist security data sets and vulnerability knowledge bases,” instead of “trying to match the US in frontier model capability and computing power.”