US accuses six Chinese AI firms of industrial-scale model theft

The FBI, NSA and CISA jointly accused DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of systematically extracting proprietary capabilities from US frontier models since late 2024, per the agencies' advisory. The practice, called distillation, is a legitimate research technique but the US says it was used at an industrial scale to train Chinese rivals like DeepSeek R1 and Qwen V3. The accusations land weeks before a Trump-Xi summit in Washington.

Bottom line — The advisory names six firms and says Beijing likely knew of the campaign targeting Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok.

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• The US agencies said the Chinese firms extracted billions of tokens across millions of requests, routing them through proxies and third-party aggregators to bypass geographic restrictions, according to the CISA advisory.
• DeepSeek alone distilled from 12 US models including GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.1 to train its R1 and V3 models, targeting reasoning, legal optimisation and agentic functions, the advisory detailed.
• Moonshot AI allegedly extracted data from 18 US models including Anthropic's Fable 5 to train its Kimi K3, using millions of queries for agentic reasoning and coding, per CyberScoop.
• Anthropic previously claimed three Chinese labs generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude through roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts, CNN reported.
• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned on X that sanctions and Entity List designations are on the table for Chinese firms crossing into IP theft, per CNN.
• China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning called the accusations groundless and said Beijing's AI development reflects scientific self-reliance, NBC News reported.
• The advisory recommends US AI companies subtly alter responses to suspected distillation attempts and share intelligence across the industry, the CISA document states.

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