US Accuses Six Chinese AI Firms of Distilling Frontier Models
American AI companies may have spent years and billions building frontier models, but US officials say six Chinese firms found a faster route: asking those models questions at industrial scale.
The NSA, CISA and FBI on Tuesday accused DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of running large-scale knowledge-distillation campaigns against US frontier AI models since at least late 2024.
According to the advisory, the companies collectively extracted billions of tokens through millions of requests involving models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI. They said the activity was conducted “likely with Chinese government awareness,” but did not allege that Chinese intelligence agencies directly participated.
“China-based AI companies are engaging in aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale,” US officials said.
Distillation itself is a legitimate AI technique. It allows a smaller model to learn from the outputs of a more capable system. The US...
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