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.
Anthropic wants firms like Alibaba punished
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.
