HONG KONG, June 25, 2026, 17:05 (HKT)
- Alibaba Group Holding (HKG:9988) dropped 4.43% to HK$95.00 in Hong Kong. The move followed Anthropic’s claim that parties linked to Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab conducted a sweeping Claude extraction operation.
- Shares lost around HK$88 billion in market value based on Google Finance numbers. Trading volume was roughly 51% higher than usual.
- Anthropic reportedly counted 28.8 million Claude exchanges, about 1.8 times more than the volume it reported in February in its case against three Chinese AI labs.
- About 30% of Alibaba Cloud’s external revenue in the March quarter came from AI-related products, which the company sees as a big part of its growth story.
Alibaba Group Holding (HKG:9988) dropped sharply Thursday, as AI-security concerns shifted into the stock price. The shares in Hong Kong ended at HK$95.00, off 4.43%, trading as low as HK$94.00 during the session. Turnover jumped to 141.4 million shares, well above the 93.91 million average. Based on a closing market cap of HK$1.90 trillion, the one-day drop wiped out about HK$88 billion in value.
Anthropic told U.S. senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren in a June 10 letter that groups tied to Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen used nearly 25,000 fake accounts to make over 28.8 million interactions with Claude between April 22 and June 5. Alibaba did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
The claimed Alibaba operation racked up an average of 1,150 Claude exchanges per account. That’s 1.8 times the size of the 16 million-plus exchanges Anthropic reported in February from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax (HKG:0100), which used about 24,000 fake accounts.
Alibaba’s valuation story is shifting to AI and cloud. In May, the company reported Cloud Intelligence revenue jumped 38% to 41.63 billion yuan for the March quarter. It also said 30% of external customer revenue came from AI-related products. Alibaba expects AI-related revenue will account for over half of external cloud revenue in about a year.
Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu told analysts after the March quarter that the payoff from AI and cloud spending was “increasingly clear” and the tech investments were “beginning to pay off commercially.” He said the focus for cloud remained on market share, with margin “still secondary.” Reuters
Alibaba-linked groups sought to “illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities” for training Alibaba models, according to a memo from Anthropic policy chief Sarah Heck, Business Insider wrote. Heck told Congress new laws are needed to sanction these operations and restrict China’s access to U.S. advanced AI systems. Business Insider
The letter refers to “distillation” as when a weaker model gets trained on a stronger model’s outputs. Anthropic has said distillation is standard practice, but says illicit distillation lets competitors reach similar capability faster and cheaper. Anthropic
The claim comes as Alibaba is also pushing back against a U.S. security label. The company filed suit against the U.S. Department of Defense on June 23 after it was named on a list of 188 so-called “Chinese military companies”. Alibaba said in the lawsuit that the decision had “no basis in fact or law” and said its products are not made for “weapons, defense, or intelligence”. Reuters
The Pentagon is barred from signing contracts with firms on the list from this month, according to Reuters, under a new U.S. law. Starting in 2027, it also can’t buy their goods or services through other vendors. Firms named include Baidu (HKG:9888) and BYD (SHE:002594).
Anthropic was hit by a sudden U.S. government order. On June 12 the company said it would shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for everyone after the Commerce Department told it to cut off foreign nationals, pointing to national security. Anthropic pushed back against the move and said the rest of its models are still running.
Alibaba faces a market test over the Claude issue—if it stays a terms-of-service dispute, that’s one thing, but it could end up folded into the broader U.S. security concerns that include Pentagon contracts, cloud business, and how it handles advanced models. The company’s AI revenue goal is now carrying an extra discount.
