Jun 30, 2026 · 29 min · 11 segments
A massive corporate espionage scandal just rocked Silicon Valley—and it’s already triggered an international trade war. In Episode 84 of What the AI?!, Jeff Keltner and Annie Delgado break down the…
Annie DelgadoHostThe backstory here, we kind of had this in the opening, but Anthropic went public with a letter to the US Senate accusing Alibaba of what's called a distillation attack, which is essentially when you're trying to train a model and there's a smarter model out there, you say, well, let's just ask the smarter model a lot of questions and use their answers as training data for our model.
That way we don't have to learn it from all the crazy stuff we could just build it on.
And they made like 29 million conversations over like 25,000 or 30,000 accounts.
fake accounts, because of course, no account is allowed to do 29 million conversations.
What's unclear to me is like the you're not supposed to do this part of the question, like says who, right? In
terms of service, I assume, like when you sign up for an anthropic account or an API, you go, hey, here's the terms of service under which I can access this.
I'm sure they're popping IP addresses and pretending like they're in residential neighborhoods and things to like make it not look like somebody's stealing data from the model.
No, I don't think we've heard anything from Alibaba about their perspective on this.
And I think the problem part of this is that there's some sense that the Chinese government okays it.
The backstory here, we kind of had this in the opening, but Anthropic went public with a letter to the US Senate accusing Alibaba of what's called a distillation attack, which is essentially when you're trying to train a model and there's a smarter model out there, you say, well, let's just ask the smarter model a lot of questions and use their answers as training data for our model.
That way we don't have to learn it from all the crazy stuff we could just build it on.
And they made like 29 million conversations over like 25,000 or 30,000 accounts.
fake accounts, because of course, no account is allowed to do 29 million conversations.
What's unclear to me is like the you're not supposed to do this part of the question, like says who, right? In
terms of service, I assume, like when you sign up for an anthropic account or an API, you go, hey, here's the terms of service under which I can access this.
I'm sure they're popping IP addresses and pretending like they're in residential neighborhoods and things to like make it not look like somebody's stealing data from the model.
No, I don't think we've heard anything from Alibaba about their perspective on this.
And I think the problem part of this is that there's some sense that the Chinese government okays it.
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