The NSA, FBI, and CISA issued a joint advisory accusing several Chinese AI companies of conducting industrial-scale campaigns to steal technology from top U.S. models.
The agencies explicitly named DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and publicly-traded Alibaba as participants in these activities.
These firms allegedly use a technique called knowledge distillation to train their models on the outputs of more advanced U.S. systems.
This strategy involves extracting billions of tokens from models like OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini to illicitly shortcut research and development costs.
The advisory claims these actions violate the terms of service of U.S. firms and form a core part of the Chinese companies' development strategy.