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-SC) 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 affiliated 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.”

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Taiwan’s existence as a self-governing democracy may depend heavily on having enough military drones to discourage any attempted invasion by China’s military. As the Taiwanese government aims to boost domestic production of military drones and Taiwanese citizens sign up for drone flight training, Taiwanese companies are forming international partnerships to sell more drones to the US military and other overseas buyers.

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense proposed a special budget that would spend $6.6 billion over six years on buying drones made in Taiwan, according to the Central News Agency that represents the national news service of Taiwan. Presented on June 18, the budget proposal would allow the government to buy more than 208,000 coastal attack drones, along with more than 1,400 coastal reconnaissance drones and 1,320 uncrewed surface vessels, between 2026 and 2031.

That would be a significant boost to the Taiwanese military arsenal that currently includes just 5,000 US-made attack drones and domestically produced drones, according to Resilience Media. During military exercises in early June, Taiwanese soldiers fired Altius-600 loitering munition drones—made by a subsidiary of the US military technology company Anduril Industries—from towed flatbed launchers to strike offshore targets, according to USNI News. In another exercise earlier this year, Taiwanese Marines used Taiwan-made drones to similarly strike targets at sea.

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The upper stage from a commercial Chinese rocket that launched last week has broken apart in space, spreading debris in a heavily trafficked part of low-Earth orbit home to the International Space Station and a significant portion of SpaceX's Starlink broadband network.

The breakup occurred shortly after the Zhuque-2E rocket reached orbit on June 9 with two satellites providing direct-to-cell communications, perhaps around the time the upper stage was expected to perform a disposal burn. The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public.

"The tracked pieces are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment to support spaceflight safety," the Space Force wrote in an advisory. "There are currently no threats to human spaceflight. Analysis is ongoing."

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Welcome to Edition 8.44 of the Rocket Report! The news this week is decidedly weighted in favor of heavy-lift rockets, largely due to the fallout from last Thursday's explosion of Blue Origin's New Glenn on its launch pad in Florida. Blue Origin aims to resume launches at the badly damaged launch facility by the end of the year, but there's good reason to be skeptical of this timeline. With New Glenn grounded, will Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos approach Elon Musk's SpaceX to launch his Blue Moon lander to the lunar south pole? It sure sounds like NASA is pushing for that.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Spaceport development moves forward in Canada. There's been a lot of talk about the Canadian government's recent commitment to invest in a sovereign launch capability. There was the announcement last year of a federal budget of 182.6 million Canadian dollars ($131 million) over three years to establish a sovereign launch program. In March, the government said it would lease a dedicated launch pad at a commercially developed spaceport in Nova Scotia for national defense purposes, committing 200 million Canadian dollars ($144 million) to the deal. The agreement is a boon for Maritime Launch Services, which is developing Spaceport Nova Scotia after years of slow progress at the coastal site, SpaceQ reports.

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