GoKawiilUS agencies accuse DeepSeek, Alibaba and other Chinese AI firms of mass model distillation
The NSA, CISA and FBI issued a joint advisory alleging that Chinese AI companies including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens from US frontier models such as Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since 2024. The agencies say this data was used to train competing systems like DeepSeek's R1 and Moonshot's Kimi K2/K3, describing the practice as 'distillation activities at an industrial scale.'
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
This marks a rare instance of US intelligence and security agencies formally accusing named Chinese AI companies of systematically siphoning capabilities from American models rather than the companies themselves making informal accusations. It signals growing government involvement in protecting AI intellectual property and could lead to new restrictions on API access or export controls affecting how Chinese firms interact with US model providers.
- NSA, CISA and FBI jointly warned that Chinese AI firms are distilling US models at industrial scale.
- DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI were named as extracting data from Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok.
- The advisory includes mitigation steps for US companies to prevent further distillation campaigns.
Source: engadget.com — Mariella Moon, 2026-09-09
Published there as: “US authorities accuse Chinese AI companies of industrial-scale campaigns to copy American models”
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