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25 Jun 2026

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Anthropic Says Alibaba Must Be Punished For Largest Claude Cloning Attack

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic has accused the Chinese firm Alibaba of launching the largest attack yet attempting to clone Claude, as China races to match the capabilities of Anthropic's leading model following Mythos' release and subsequent restriction from foreign markets. Ars obtained a June 10 letter sent to Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) one day ahead of a Senate committee hearing on "AI and the American Dream." In the letter, Anthropic shared "new, confidential evidence of the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude's capabilities we have ever measured." The attacks occurred between April 22 and June 5, when "operators afliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba's AI lab" allegedly generated "more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts," Anthropic said. Violating Claude's terms of service and access restrictions, this campaign "targeted some of Claude's most valuable capabilities, such as agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon tasks." According to Anthropic, Alibaba evaded detection by "using obfuscation techniques and proxy networks." As Chinese demand for reliable obfuscation techniques increases, Anthropic warned there's already "a growing circumvention economy" to fuel an ever-expanding web of future distillation attacks. [...] "Alibaba is governed by an independent board, none of whom has any military affiliation," Alibaba said. "Its products and services are built for retail, logistics, and enterprise information technology -- not weapons, defense, or intelligence." Anthropic appears unconvinced, however, that Alibaba isn't working with the Chinese government. In the letter, Anthropic warned that without stronger interventions, these distillation attacks will "help China reach Mythos Preview-level capabilities sooner." To keep the US ahead of China, Anthropic recommended that Congress pass legislation with three objectives. First, antitrust laws must be updated to allow AI firms to share information about evolving Chinese tactics to deter more threats. Second, the US needs more export controls on chips to hamstring Chinese access to advanced compute so that they simply can't train on US model outputs. That could make conducting distillation attacks pointless, Anthropic suggested. Finally, Congress should pass laws penalizing Chinese labs' "bad behavior" so that it's "more difficult and costly" to rely on distillation attacks to advance Chinese models. Penalties could include limiting Chinese firms from accessing US models or advanced US chips or from relying on data centers outside of China, Anthropic suggested.

Ford Rehires 350 Engineers After AI Fails To Preserve Expertise or Train Juniors

After Ford's automated quality-control systems and AI tools fell short, the automaker hired 350 veteran engineers over the past three years to mentor younger staff and reprogram the underperforming technology. "Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as the information you use to train it," Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters on a call Wednesday. "Over prior years, we didn't pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles." Bloomberg reports: Those engineers were "at the heart" of Ford's efforts to turn around quality problems, said Kumar Galhotra, chief operating officer. They now run mandatory meetings that rigorously troubleshoot quality problems and they have reprogrammed AI tools to head off glitches before they happen. "We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems" and not getting the desired results, Galhotra said. "We brought back technical specialists" and "they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor." The return of the veteran engineers at Ford cuts against the prevailing wisdom -- and fear -- that AI will replace all kinds of knowledge workers. But Ford found the machines couldn't replace experience. "Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product," Poon said. But "we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals." As a result of the efforts of the old hands, Ford vaulted above quality stalwarts such as Toyota and Honda on JD Power's bellwether survey that measures the quality of a car during the first three months of ownership. Only luxury brands Porsche and Genesis topped Ford this year.

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Besimple AI (YC P25) Is Hiring

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25 Jun 2026 5:00pm GMT

Deno 2.9

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25 Jun 2026 4:22pm GMT

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Micron Locks In Historically High Memory Prices For Five Years

Micron has signed 16 "strategic customer agreements" (SCAs) that include a floor price the company says comes with "a very robust gross margin for Micron, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle." Most of the deals run through 2030 and cover about 40% of Micron's revenue. The Register reports: Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company's Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher. The CEO said 16 customers have signed SCAs and then explained why it's worth locking into the deals even though they bake in such high margins. "Our customers are recognizing that supply shortages in memory and storage will take considerable time to improve," he said. "Even as we expect industry supply to improve gradually in 2028, we currently do not have line of sight as to when memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand." Even massive efforts to build new chip fabs aren't much help, he said, because the increasing complexity of new memory types means it takes longer to build factories -- and when they come online there still won't be enough capacity to build both the high-bandwidth memory needed for AI and other types of NAND and DRAM. "Supply is structurally constrained in its growth and ability to meet industry demand, despite our comprehensive efforts to increase supply," he said. Don't assume that SCAs mean your suppliers get price certainty, because Mehrotra said the deals will account for 40 percent of Micron revenue -- meaning the company is reserving most of its inventory to sell at prices it can negotiate. The CEO did have a little good news in the form of predictions that Micron's DRAM output in 2026 will "grow in the low- to mid-20s percentage range, slightly above our prior outlook." He also revealed that the SCAs see customers pay up front, which helps Micron to fund its fab expansions.