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US Agencies Warn China Is Systematically Extracting Frontier AI Capabilities

NSA, CISA and FBI warn Chinese AI firms including DeepSeek and Moonshot systematically extracted billions of tokens from US frontier models since late 2024.

The NSA, CISA, and FBI report that China-based AI companies including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens from US frontier models such as Claude, GPT-4/GPT-5, Gemini, and Grok 4 since late 2024. The distillation trained DeepSeek's R1 and V3 and Moonshot's Kimi-K2/K3 models, and the agencies mapped the tactics to MITRE ATLAS while noting additional novel techniques like subscription exploitation and request metadata sanitization. They describe the activity as a strategic economic threat to US technological leadership and recommend behavioral detection, differential privacy, and targeted cost-imposing responses.

SecurityWeek · 7d agoAI safety & security in the wild1

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.

CISA Advisories · 8d agoAdvisory in the wild1

Six Chinese AI firms accused of aggressively copying US frontier models

NSA, CISA, and FBI accuse DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI of industrial-scale distillation of US frontier models via API abuse.

A joint NSA, CISA, and FBI release alleges six Chinese AI firms have extracted capabilities from US frontier models, including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, since at least late 2024, likely with Chinese government awareness. Tactics include bulk procurement of premium subscriptions with fraudulent accounts, proxy routing to evade geo-restrictions, and prompt injection to force models to reveal hidden chain-of-thought reasoning. Agencies recommend stronger identity verification, monitoring of anomalous usage, and quietly downgrading or adding noise to responses for suspected distillers, while warning these mitigations could frustrate legitimate users.

Ars Technica · AI · 6d agoAI safety & security in the wild 4 sources

Attackers Steal METR API Key and Consume AI Credits Worth About $600,000

METR disclosed attackers stole an API key and burned about $600,000 in inference credits, plus a second probing campaign against its infrastructure.

METR, the AI model evaluation non-profit, disclosed two 2026 security incidents. In March, attackers found a publicly exposed EC2 instance behind a fail-open authentication bug, prompted an agent to reveal its API key, added SSH persistence, and consumed roughly $600,000 in inference credits over three weeks. In May, a likely financially motivated actor systematically probed METR's public infrastructure using agents for vulnerability discovery, credential stuffing, OAuth token grants and staff phishing, with no confirmed access to non-public data.

The Hacker News · 15d agoData breach in the wild

50,000 Stripe Secrets Leaked in Public Code

Over 50,000 Stripe merchant API keys leaked via public code and logs; 659 merchant accounts' data offered on trading forum.

Ransomnews researchers identified over 50,000 unique Stripe merchant API keys exposed in public GitHub repositories, GitHub Actions logs, and misconfigured web servers. A dataset on a data-trading forum dated August 18, 2026 contained live keys for 659 merchant accounts plus roughly 35 GB of customer and payment data. Researchers demonstrated a leaked key enabled accessing customer lists, creating fraudulent payment links, and making test charges within 17 hours. Stripe itself was not compromised; over 3,000 misconfigured web servers revealed Stripe-related strings, with about 12% containing working keys.

Security Affairs · 28d agoData breach in the wild