NSA, CISA and FBI accuse six Chinese AI firms of industrial-scale distillation of US models

Industry official + media 3 src. ~1 min

A joint US government advisory (AA26-251A) says China-based AI companies including DeepSeek, Alibaba and Moonshot ran 'aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale', extracting capabilities from US frontier models such as Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok. It formalizes allegations previously made by Anthropic and OpenAI and urges US labs to add mitigations.

Why it matters

First formal government backing of the distillation claims; it escalates the US-China AI fight from lab accusations to state-level accusations and could feed into restrictions on Chinese open-weight models.

Importance: 3/5

First formal US government attribution of industrial-scale model distillation

deepseek qwen kimi policy distillation us china

Sources

official China-Based AI Companies Conducting Industrial-Scale Distillation Campaigns Against U.S. AI Companies (CISA advisory AA26-251A)

media US claims Chinese AI companies' core AI strategy is distilling American models

media Chinese AI firms are siphoning capabilities from American models, CISA warns