US Agencies Warn Chinese AI Firms Are Extracting Advanced AI Models
Brief
US agencies accuse six Chinese AI firms of extracting billions of tokens from US AI models to accelerate development and copy advanced capabilities.
NSA, CISA, and the FBI jointly published an advisory accusing six Chinese AI companies, DeepSeek , Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z. AI , of running industrial-scale extraction campaigns against US frontier models since at least late 2024. The framing is deliberate: this isn’t a footnote to how these companies build AI, the agencies call it the core of their entire development strategy.
Distillation is a legitimate and widely used technique. It involves training a smaller AI model to reproduce the answers and capabilities of a larger one. But the advisory says the activity it uncovered went much further.