Official U.S. allegations against six Chinese AI companies for industrial theft from Western models

U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the FBI, have accused six major Chinese artificial intelligence companies of conducting industrial-scale data scraping campaigns to extract the capabilities of advanced Western AI models. These agencies claim that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI have, since late 2024 and likely with the knowledge of the Chinese government, attempted to leverage versions of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok. According to joint reports by these U.S. agencies, the Chinese companies have employed "industrial-scale distillation," a method that allows them to drastically reduce their AI development timelines and save billions of dollars in frontier model training costs. These actions are characterized as a strategic threat and acts of economic espionage against U.S. technology leaders.