Six Chinese AI firms accused of aggressively copying US frontier models
Ars Technica
1mo · 11 min
US urges AI firms to ID, then secretly switch, Chinese users to less-capable models.
US urges AI firms to ID, then secretly switch, Chinese users to less-capable models.
The United States has now named six Chinese AI firms accused of waging industrial-scale attacks distilling US frontier AI model capabilities and perhaps sparing billions in Chinese development costs.
In a joint release Tuesday, the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleged that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI have been attacking US models since at least late 2024. The firms “likely” acted with “Chinese government awareness” when extracting capabilities from US models, including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, agencies said.
“China-based AI companies that conduct industrial-scale distillation against US AI models see significantly shorter AI development timelines and reduced financial expenditures in training a frontier model,” agencies said.
All American AI firms must work with the government and US allies to end the alleged theft threatening the US lead in the AI race, the agencies said. That will require coordinated action across the AI ecosystem to combat the “aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale that extract restricted proprietary functionalities and capabilities of US frontier AI models.”…
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