Anthropic accuses Alibaba of'illicitly' accessing AI models Alibaba's American depositary receipts sank to a session low on the news, falling more than 3% to $99.10 at 3:38 p.m. in New York on Wednesday. Anthropic accused Chinese technology giant Alibaba Group Holding of waging a large-scale effort to "illicitly" access its Claude artificial intelligence model using thousands of fraudulent accounts that undermine the U.S. AI developer's decision to keep its products out of China. Anthropic claimed that a campaign by operators linked to Alibaba's Qwen AI lab targeted Claude's most prized capabilities, including software engineering and agentic reasoning, according to a letter that the AI startup sent to several U.S. senators and White House officials. The company said it was the biggest attempt so far by a Chinese company to piggyback on the work of top U.S. labs. In its letter, Anthropic claimed that the effort involved 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April and June through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts, according to people familiar with the document and a copy seen by Bloomberg News. The company said the Alibaba campaign resembled past efforts by other Chinese developers that Anthropic flagged in a blog post earlier this year.

US artificial intelligence (AI) giant Anthropic has accused Chinese e-commerce and technology firm Alibaba of brazenly and illicitly extracting its Claude AI model's capabilities. In a letter sent to two members of the US Congress, the San Francisco-based company said operators linked to Alibaba carried out almost 29 million exchanges with Claude using thousands of fraudulent accounts in what it called the largest extraction campaign of its kind. Anthropic urged Congress to penalise the companies behind attacks like this and to ramp up measures to prevent US tech from being stolen. The BBC has contacted Alibaba for comment and requested more details from Anthropic. Anthropic's letter, dated 10 June and addressed to US Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, accused New York Stock Exchange-listed Alibaba of carrying out the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude's capabilities.

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Chinese open models are spreading fast, from Hugging Face to Silicon Valley. In this photo illustration, the DeepSeek apps is seen on a phone in front of a flag of China on January 28, 2025 in Hong Kong, China. The past year has marked a turning point for Chinese AI. Since DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model in January 2025, Chinese companies have repeatedly delivered AI models that match the performance of leading Western models at a fraction of the cost. Just last week the Chinese firm Moonshot AI released its latest open-weight model, Kimi K2.5, which came close to top proprietary systems such as Anthropic's Claude Opus on some early benchmarks. The difference: K2.5 is roughly one-seventh Opus's price.

Two important things happened on January 20, 2025. In Washington, D.C., Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. In Hangzhou, China, a little-known Chinese firm called DeepSeek released R1, an AI model that industry watchers called a "Sputnik moment" for the country's AI industry. "Whether we like it or not, we're suddenly engaged in a fast-paced competition to build and define this groundbreaking technology that will determine so much about the future of civilization," said Trump later that year, as he announced his administration's AI action plan, which was titled "Winning the Race." There are many interpretations of what AI companies and their governments are racing towards, says AI policy researcher Lennart Heim: to deploy AI systems in the economy, to build robots, to create human-like artificial general intelligence.

Since 2021, China has reportedly poured $100bn into support for AI datacentres. Since 2021, China has reportedly poured $100bn into support for AI datacentres. Beijing's AI policy is focused on real-life applications but Chinese companies are beginning to articulate their own grand visions S tanding on stage in the eastern China tech hub of Hangzhou, Alibaba's normally media-shy CEO made an attention-grabbing announcement. "The world today is witnessing the dawn of an AI-driven intelligent revolution," Eddie Wu told a developer conference in September. " Artificial general intelligence (AGI) will not only amplify human intelligence but also unlock human potential, paving the way for the arrival of artificial superintelligence (ASI)."

China's biggest shopping event starts five weeks early to revive spending It's known to be China's biggest online shopping event - taking place on 11 November each year. But this year, Single's Day sales have already begun in mid-October, as part of efforts by Chinese retailers to boost spending in a sluggish market. China has been plagued with issues like growing youth unemployment, a prolonged property crisis, steep government debt and an ongoing trade war with the US - all of which is making the country's consumers cut back on spending. The Chinese government has been spending billions - through family subsidies, more wages and discounts for consumer goods in a bid to counter this, but retail sales growth is still failing to meet expectations. Originally created by Alibaba as a Chinese shopping festival, Singles' Day is akin to Amazon's Prime Day or Black Friday promotions elsewhere in the world.

"It reflects the broader competitiveness of China's frontier AI ecosystem," says Scott Singer, a visiting scholar in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That ecosystem includes DeepSeek's R1 and Tencent's Hunyuan model, which Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark has said is by some measures "world-class." That said, assessments of Alibaba's latest model are preliminary, both due to the inherent challenge of measuring model capabilities, and because so far, the model has only been assessed by Alibaba itself. "The information environment is not very rich right now," says Singer. Since the release of DeepSeek's R1 model in January sent waves through the global stock market, China's tech ecosystem has been in the spotlight--particularly as the U.S. increasingly sees itself as racing against China to create artificial general intelligence (AGI)--highly advanced AI systems capable of performing most cognitive work, from graphic design to machine-learning research.

Apple's artificial intelligence features for iPhones could be available in China as early as May, according to Bloomberg. The company reportedly established several teams in China and the US to make that happen, and it's also teaming up with local companies for its generative AI needs in the country. Joe Tsai, Alibaba Group's Chairman, recently confirmed that Apple will use his company's generative AI technology for Chinese iPhones during an event. Tsai didn't say when Apple intends to roll out the AI features that use Alibaba's tech, but The Information previously reported that the companies had already submitted them for approval to the country's regulators. Bloomberg says Apple will use Alibaba's technology for its on-device AI models, specifically as a layer on top that can censor certain materials and information for the Chinese government.

The good news is it's actually not that hard! I recently dug around and realized that many Chinese AI models are much more accessible overseas than I expected. You can access the majority of them either by registering accounts on their websites or using popular open-source AI platforms like Hugging Face. So I published this practical guide today that lists a dozen of the top Chinese LLM chatbots you can use and the methods to easily access them in minutes, from anywhere in the world. During my experiments with these models, one thing soon became clear: While most Chinese AI companies have set a higher bar for access to their products than their Western counterparts, a trend toward open-sourcing AI models is making them ever more accessible to an overseas audience.