US tech firm Anthropic has embedded code in its AI models to identify and block Chinese users, citing national security concerns. The company accuses Alibaba of a massive "distillation attack" to clone its AI capabilities.
Anthropic claims Alibaba-affiliated operators used 25,000 fraudulent accounts to extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, urging Congress to strengthen AI protections and calling the attack a national security issue.
The US is preparing to crack down on China's alleged industrial-scale theft of American AI intellectual property through distillation attacks. White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios warned in a memo that foreign entities principally based in China are using tens of thousands of proxy accounts to distill US frontier AI systems. Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI have all accused Chinese firms of using distillation to clone their models. China has dismissed the accusations as pure slander, while Congress considers treating model extraction as industrial espionage.
