Intelligence agencies warn of China’s large-scale AI model distillation efforts

Three federal national security and intelligence agencies issued a joint advisory on Tuesday warning U.S. artificial intelligence developers that their Chinese counterparts are targeting American-made models with distillation campaigns, where one model queries a larger, more advanced model to learn from it.

The National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation specified that Chinese companies DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI used “aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation” tactics to extract billions of tokens from the exchanges within U.S. frontier AI models, likely with Chinese government awareness, since 2024.

“China-based AI companies route distillation requests through multiple pathways to gain unauthorized access, consequently violating U.S. AI companies’ terms of use,” the advisory said. “These pathways include native application programming interfaces (APIs), remote cloud providers, and third-party aggregators that automatically obfuscate user metadata to avoid detection.”

Leading models, including variants of Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and SpaceXAI’s Grok, were all listed as targeted models.