Chinese AI firms are siphoning capabilities from American models, CISA warns
CISA, NSA and FBI warn Chinese AI firms including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI extracted billions of tokens from US frontier models via distillation campaigns.
A joint CISA, NSA and FBI advisory says China-based firms including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI have run industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns against US frontier models such as Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since at least late 2024, likely with Chinese government knowledge. The campaigns used gray-market API proxies called transfer stations, premium account pools and traffic routing to bypass restrictions, evade safeguards and exfiltrate billions of tokens used to train models like DeepSeek R1/V3 and Kimi. The agencies challenge DeepSeek's reported $5.6 million training cost and recommend identity verification, usage monitoring, response variation, differential privacy and indicator sharing as defenses.
- Six Chinese AI firms extracted billions of tokens from US frontier models
- Transfer stations and account pools obscured origin and bypassed usage limits
- Z.AI distilled data from GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 for chain-of-thought reasoning
- Detection signs include 24/7 usage and anomalous subscription-to-API ratios
- Mitigations include differential privacy, response variation and indicator sharing
- Victims
- US AI providers
- Countries
- ChinaUnited States
From the original article
3 min read at helpnetsecurity.com
China-based AI companies are using large-scale knowledge distillation campaigns to copy capabilities from leading U. S. AI models, according to a joint cybersecurity advisory from the CISA, NSA, and FBI.
By Anamarija Pogorelec · helpnetsecurity.com
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