US authorities accuse Chinese AI companies of industrial-scale campaigns to copy American models

American authorities are accusing Chinese companies of "distillation activities at an industrial scale." The National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have issued a joint cybersecurity advisory, warning organizations that Chinese AI companies are extracting the "proprietary functionalities and capabilities" of frontier American models. Specifically, the agencies are accusing DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of extracting "billions of tokens across millions of exchanges/requests" from American models, including Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT, Google's Gemini and xAI's Grok, since 2024. Distillation is the term for a method in AI development in which the output of a powerful model is used to train newer ones. The warning states that DeepSeek used data and capabilities from various Claude, Gemini, GPT and Grok models to train its own, including the R1.