Chinese AI firms are siphoning capabilities from American models, CISA warns - Help Net Security
Chinese AI firms are siphoning capabilities from American models, CISA warns - Help Net Security
摘要: Anamarija Pogorelec
, Senior Staff Writer, Help Net Security
September 9, 2026
Chinese AI firms are siphoning capabilities from American mod
正文
Anamarija Pogorelec
, Senior Staff Writer, Help Net Security
September 9, 2026
Chinese AI firms are siphoning capabilities from American models, CISA warns
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.
Knowledge distillation is a standard AI training technique that uses outputs from a more capable model to help train another model. The agencies say companies in China have used it at industrial scale to extract restricted capabilities including reasoning, coding and other specialized functions, making distillation a core part of their model development strategies.
“We strongly urge AI companies to take immediate steps to safeguard their platforms against knowledge distillation campaigns that threaten to close the gap in advancements made by American companies,” said CISA Acting Director
Nick Andersen
.
Companies and models targeted
DeepSeek
, Moonshot AI, Alibaba Group, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI have extracted billions of tokens through millions of requests to U.S. frontier AI models, including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok, since at least late 2024.
The agencies assess that the activity has occurred likely with the knowledge of the Chinese government.
DeepSeek has extracted data and capabilities from U.S. frontier AI models to help train DeepSeek R1 and V3, focusing on reasoning, writing, agentic functions, question answering and specialized tasks such as legal work.
advisory
challenges DeepSeek’s reported $5.6 million training cost, saying the figure does not account for the true cost of data obtained through extensive distillation.
Moonshot AI has carried out similar activity since at least mid-2025, using U.S. frontier models to improve software engineering, mathematics, supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning capabilities in its Kimi models.
Alibaba, MiniMa