Anthropic accused Alibaba of rushing “shamelessly” to build copycat cloud, unimpressed by Trump’s threats to crack down on foreign efforts to copy the US frontier model despite relying on US investors.
“Alibaba is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, maintains business operations in the United States, and is accountable to U.S. investors and regulators,” Anthropic’s letter said, yet this activity echoed Trump’s memo warning that cloning efforts were “unacceptable.”
Arce could not immediately reach Alibaba for comment.
Anthropic wants companies like Alibaba to be punished
However, Alibaba is already preparing for a confrontation with Trump. In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, Alibaba accused the Trump administration of blacklisting the company after unfairly linking it to the Chinese military, Reuters reports. Alibaba is seeking to remove the Trump designation, which it claims has “no basis in fact or law.”
“Alibaba is governed by an independent board, none of whom have any military affiliations,” Alibaba said. “Its products and services are built for retail, logistics and enterprise information technology—not for weapons, defense or intelligence.”
However, Anthropic does not agree that Alibaba is not working with the Chinese government. In the letter, Anthropic warned that without strong intervention, these distillation attacks would “help China quickly reach Mythos preview-level capabilities.”
To keep the US ahead of China, Anthropic recommended that Congress pass legislation with three objectives. First, antitrust laws should be updated to allow AI companies to share information about developing Chinese strategies to prevent greater threats.
Second, the US needs greater export controls on chips to hinder China’s access to advanced computers so that they cannot train on US model output. Anthropic suggested that this could make conducting distillation attacks futile.
Finally, Congress should pass legislation to punish the “bad behavior” of Chinese laboratories to make it “more difficult and costly” to rely on distillation attacks to pursue the Chinese model. Anthropic suggested that penalties could include restricting Chinese companies from accessing American models or advanced American chips or relying on data centers outside China.
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