Intelligence agencies warn of China’s large-scale AI model distillation efforts
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ByAlexandra Kelley,
Staff Correspondent, Nextgov/FCW
September 8, 2026 05:52 PM ET
Three agencies issued a joint statement warning that Chinese companies DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI have used the tactics to extract billions of tokens from U.S. models.
Three federal national security and intelligence agencies issued a joint advisory on Tuesday warning U.S. artificial intelligence developers that their Chinese counterparts are targeting American-made models with distillation campaigns, where one model queries a larger, more advanced model to learn from it.
The National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation specified that Chinese companies DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI used “aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation” tactics to extract billions of tokens from the exchanges within U.S. frontier AI models, likely with Chinese government awareness, since 2024.
“China-based AI companies route distillation requests through...
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