Anthropic · Alibaba · Claude · China · US Congress · Crypto Briefing
Anthropic closes loopholes to prevent Chinese access to Claude
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A massive distillation attack tied to Alibaba's Qwen lab prompted Anthropic to tighten identity checks and call on Congress for stronger penalties.
Key facts
- Between April 22 and June 5, 2026, roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts generated more than 28.8 million interactions with Claude
- In April 2026, Anthropic also began rolling out identity verification for flagged users, requiring government-issued IDs and live selfies before granting or restoring access
- By early July 2026, Anthropic had walked back at least some of its covert detection measures after users pushed back
- A massive distillation attack tied to Alibaba's Qwen lab prompted Anthropic to tighten identity checks and call on Congress for stronger penalties
Summary
Anthropic is rolling out a stricter enforcement regime designed to stop Chinese entities from accessing its Claude models, whether through direct API abuse or the kind of elaborate workarounds that its existing rules technically didn’t cover. The proximate cause is hard to ignore. Distillation means feeding a powerful model enormous volumes of questions and logging its answers, then using that data to train a cheaper model that mimics the original’s behavior. In its June letter to senators, Anthropic called for two things: better information sharing between U.S. AI companies when distillation attacks are detected, and significantly harsher penalties for anyone caught running one.