Anthropic/Alibaba, Instagram betting, FIFA
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Anthropic/Alibaba, Instagram betting, FIFA<br>Stealing profitably, Betting on gender reveals, Creating fixable problems<br>Jun 25, 2026
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→ Alibaba stole Anthropic’s crown jewels and somehow got poorer as a result.<br>→ Instagram is going to enable betting on gender reveal videos.<br>→ FIFA is creating problems and conveniently has the perfect solution handy.
Stealing profitably
Is someone richer after stealing the crown jewels?<br>Apparently not, according to today’s coverage of the Anthropic/Alibaba spat. Anthropic is accusing Alibaba of using 25,000 accounts to access Claude to glean information to help Alibaba improve their own AI model.<br>Alibaba’s stock fell a few percent in trading in Hong Kong. The Hang Seng index was down a few percent as well and the Bank of China fell even more. So, hardly a big movement at all.<br>And would we not have expected Alibaba’s stock price to have gone up? I mean, they are basically getting state-of-the-art R&D (valued in the billions of dollars or yuan) for free. Shouldn’t the stock move up?<br>Anthropic alleges that the 25,000 accounts exchanged 29 million messages with Claude in order to help train Alibaba models.1 Let’s assume for a second that you were monitoring Claude’s outputs in real-time and started to notice this type of attack happening. One thing you could do would be start feeding Alibaba bad advice. Not ridiculously bad, but time wasting, token burning, booby trapped stuff. You are smart, right, so you can do that. Make a maze and have them burn metal trying to scamper through it.<br>But instead you give them real good answers? This now reflects poorly on Anthropic. You’ve been railing for years about this being a threat and you weren’t able to monitor it and react dynamically. At least route them to a cheaper model and keep charging for the more expensive model and pocket the difference. That would help the P&L for the upcoming IPO.<br>This thinking could explain the slight stock drop. OK, we got some free R&D out of this, but we should price in that eventually Anthropic will get smart enough to interfere with the answers it gives and then the gravy train will end. That they know about the 25,000 accounts means they are on it—slowly—and unguarded flank is being fixed. According to the WSJ:<br>It’s not the first time Anthropic has said Chinese AI labs are using its technology to train their own AI models.<br>In a blog post in February, Anthropic said it had identified industrial-scale campaigns by three AI laboratories to extract Claude’s capabilities.
So Anthropic has had an eternity to fix this problem. Lengthening the lead over competitors and open source models surely falls somewhere on their priority list after growing revenue and going public.<br>Conveniently, Alibaba’s business model is not reliant on getting big enterprise contracts from US businesses that they could be blocked from selling to. The stock rises if this was free advertising to European and Asian businesses that the Alibaba models are pretty good now. The stock falls if there were concerns on further tariffs, hurting their ecommerce business, brought on by their Anthropic escapade .<br>Looking at it from the exact wrong angle—here’s a take on Alibaba’s stock:<br>“Given this is not the first distillation allegation targeting Chinese firms, I expect the reputational damage … to be small,” said Laila Khawaja, a research director at Gavekal Technologies.
Chinese company steals Western technology is hardly new. Chinese company is successful in stealing from world leader in AI is a net positive on Alibaba’s stock.<br>This reputational damage is entirely on Anthropic. They are leaking state-of-the-art information that they can’t get control of. Claude now looks smart enough that it’s worth using to make Chinese models better, but dumb enough that it isn’t able to identify what is happening and just gives up the goods.<br>Stealing the crown jewels is profitable, but cat and mouse usually isn’t.
Betting on gender reveals
Meta is working on a prediction market called Arena. I can see it incorporated into Instagram and Facebook, coming soon. The name connotes sports, and I’m sure they’ll do that too, but why not really leverage the advantages that come with all the content and the relationships with creators they have.<br>On Instagram, they can take a gender reveal video and slap pink and baby-blue buttons under it and wham, you’ve got one of the more popular pieces of content on Instagram now built for social betting.<br>Instagram can grow the in-app gambling through creators already on the platform. It can offer creators a share of exchange fees on markets they create, promote, or pump. Instagram might not need to pay anything—creators might decide the algorithm is smiling kindly enough on engaging with Arena that they just choose to promote it to expand their own reach.<br>Going live on Instagram from your kid’s Little League game? Well—now...