China is trying to glean the secrets of U.S. artificial-intelligence models by using simpler AI models to query more advanced American ones, national-security and intelligence agencies warned on Tuesday.
In a joint advisory, the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation said that Chinese companies DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI used “aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation” tactics to extract billions of tokens from the exchanges within U.S. frontier AI models since 2024, likely with Chinese government awareness.
Distillation is used to reduce the time and money needed to create a new model.
“China-based AI companies route distillation requests through multiple pathways to gain unauthorized access, consequently violating U.S. AI companies’ terms of use,” the advisory said. “These pathways include native application programming interfaces (APIs), remote cloud providers, and third-party aggregators that automatically obfuscate user metadata to avoid detection.”
It said the distillation campaigns targeted variants of Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and SpaceXAI’s Grok.
“China-based AI companies deliberately distribute operations across multiple providers, platforms, and pathways to avoid single-point detection,” the advisory said. “They also attempt to distill the best capabilities and proprietary features of each U.S. frontier model to train their China-based AI models. This represents systematic extraction of proprietary functionalities and capabilities threatening U.S. technological leadership.”
The agencies recommended three steps for U.S. AI developers: implement comprehensive detection and mitigation, deploy targeted response changes, and establish cross-organization intelligence sharing.
White House Office of Science and Technology Director Michael Kratsios in July said Chinese distillation efforts — specifically ones by Moonshot AI — have sought to steal proprietary functions from Anthropic’s advanced Fable model. Anthropic made the same accusations in February.
Advocacy groups have also requested the White House take stronger action to keep Chinese companies from importing advanced semiconductor chips.
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