China-Based Artificial Intelligence Companies Conducting Industrial-Scale Distillation Campaigns Against U.S. AI Companies
NSA, CISA, and FBI warn DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese AI firms ran industrial-scale distillation of U.S. frontier models, threatening U.S. AI leadership.
A joint NSA, CISA, and FBI Cybersecurity Advisory (AA26-251A) says China-based firms DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens from U.S. frontier models including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, likely with Chinese government knowledge. Campaigns running since at least late 2024 used native APIs, cloud providers, third-party aggregators, gray-market proxy "transfer stations", and shared premium subscriptions to bypass geographic restrictions, evade safeguards, and violate providers' terms of use. The agencies recommend detecting anomalous prompts, accounts, and usage patterns; subtly altering responses to suspected distillers; and cross-organization intelligence sharing. They also call DeepSeek's publicly cited $5.6M training cost misleading because it excludes data acquired through distillation.
- Six named China-based AI firms, likely with Chinese government awareness, targeted reasoning and proprietary domain capabilities.
- DeepSeek's campaigns since late 2024 generated synthetic training data for its R1 and V3 models.
- Alibaba used industrial-scale distillation to improve its Qwen model family.
- Techniques include CoT extraction, automated failover between access pathways, and quality evaluation frameworks to detect countermeasures.
- Recommended actions: detect anomalous accounts and usage, alter responses to attenuate distillation payoffs, and share intelligence.
- Countries
- ChinaUnited States
From the original article
11 min read at cisa.govExecutive summary China-based artificial intelligence (AI) companies are conducting systematic extraction of proprietary functionalities and capabilities of U. S. AI companies’ models through industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns that form the core—not merely a supplement—of their AI development strategy.
By CISA · cisa.gov
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