Feds accuse China of ‘systematic’ distillation of U.S. AI models
Brief
The U. S. government is accusing Chinese AI companies of engaging in a deliberate and “systematic” effort to illegally distill U. S. frontier AI models and their capabilities.
According to a joint cybersecurity advisory from the National Security Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI, the sheer scale of these efforts since 2024 indicate that distillation is a critical part of China’s AI industrial policy.
“China-based artificial intelligence companies are conducting systematic extraction of proprietary functionalities and capabilities of U. S. AI companies’ models through industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns that form the core—not merely a supplement—of their AI development strategy,” the agencies wrote.
The advisory names Chinese companies like DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.