A cynical and bad faith response, why even bother to write anything?

Yes. It was good enough to communicate that news item.

Did Alibaba perform "an attack" or were they taking advantage of resources and going beyond Anthropic's terms of service? Didn't Anthropic do the same kinds of things when building their models?

These are all interesting questions, but they don't have to be addressed in full by a news blurb about a letter Anthropic wrote to some senators.

Money. More eyeballs on it means more ad impressions. Same thing with 24 hour news channels.