Alibaba Shares Slide 5% After AI Scraping

Alibaba Shares Slide After Anthropic AI Scraping Allegation

Alibaba’s Hong Kong‑listed shares (HK:9988) dropped 5% to HK$94.55 by 02:40 GMT on Thursday, marking the lowest level since February 2025. The same day, the company’s U.S.-listed shares closed 3% lower on Wednesday.

The decline followed a letter from U.S. AI startup Anthropic to U.S. senators and White House officials, accusing operators linked to Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab of conducting a large‑scale “distillation” campaign. According to the letter, the campaign employed nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to generate more than 28.8 million interactions with Anthropic’s Claude model between 22 April and 5 June.

Anthropic alleges the purpose of the campaign was to extract advanced model capabilities that could be used to enhance rival AI systems, describing it as the largest known distillation effort against the company.

The accusations arise amid increasing scrutiny by U.S. authorities of Chinese access to advanced American AI technologies, highlighting the intensifying competition between U.S. and Chinese AI firms.