Anthropic urges Congress to strengthen AI export controls, accuses Alibaba of massive distillation attack

Anthropic just dropped a bombshell on Capitol Hill, accusing Alibaba of orchestrating the largest known distillation attack against its AI models and calling on Congress to tighten export controls in response.

In a letter dated June 10 sent to Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren on the US Senate Banking Committee, Anthropic detailed what it described as a systematic effort by Alibaba’s AI lab to siphon intelligence from its models. The scale is staggering: 28.8 million exchanges conducted between April 22 and June 5, routed through approximately 25,000 fraudulent accounts.

What distillation actually means

Think of AI model distillation like photocopying someone else’s homework, but at an industrial scale. A smaller, cheaper model is trained by feeding it the outputs of a more powerful one, effectively transferring the larger model’s capabilities without doing the expensive research and development work.

For Anthropic, this isn’t just an intellectual property problem. It’s a national security one. The company argues that distillation campaigns like Alibaba’s directly undermine US restrictions on advanced AI chips. If Chinese firms can simply extract the knowledge baked into American models, export controls on the hardware used to train those models become far less effective.

This isn’t even the first time Anthropic has raised this alarm. Back in February, the company disclosed what it called “industrial-scale” distillation campaigns conducted by several Chinese AI labs, including DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax. Those earlier efforts collectively involved over 16 million exchanges funneled through around 24,000 fake accounts.

The government response is already accelerating

Anthropic’s letter didn’t land in a vacuum. A White House memorandum issued in April pledged support for efforts to detect and mitigate distillation attacks. According to Anthropic’s letter, Alibaba disregarded prior warnings issued by the Trump Administration.

Two days after Anthropic sent its letter, on June 12, the US Commerce Department released an export control directive that prompted Anthropic to suspend global access to its advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

Anthropic is also calling for coordinated efforts from industry players and cloud providers to combat illicit distillation.

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