U.S. Agencies Accuse Six Chinese AI Firms of Industrial-Scale Model Distillation

U.S. national-security agencies have accused six China-based AI companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI—of running industrial-scale campaigns to distill capabilities from American frontier models. The Sept. 8 advisory says the activity began at least in late 2024, involved billions of tokens and millions of exchanges, and likely occurred with Chinese government awareness.