U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies say that six Chinese AI companies conducted industrial-scale distillation attacks on American frontier AI models since at least late 2024.

A joint advisory from CISA, NSA, and the FBI states that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens through millions of requests from frontier AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI.

The agencies assess that the scale and sophistication of the operations indicate Chinese government awareness, mentioning that this approach is likely a core development strategy for the offending firms.