NSA, CISA, FBI Name Six Chinese AI Firms in Industrial-Scale Distillation Campaign Against U.S. Frontier Models

The National Security Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the FBI jointly accused six Chinese AI companies of conducting systematic knowledge distillation campaigns against U.S. AI firms at an industrial scale on September 8. The agencies named DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI as the companies responsible, alleging they extracted billions of tokens across millions of exchanges from U.S. frontier models including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok since at least late 2024, likely with Chinese government awareness. The advisory concluded that distillation functions as the critical core of these companies' development programs rather than an ancillary method.

The advisory is unusually specific, listing 41 distinct American models by version and mapping the behavior to ten MITRE ATLAS techniques. The agencies described the activity as aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation at an industrial scale. DeepSeek is accused of drawing on multiple versions of Claude, GPT and Gemini to generate training data for its R1 and V3 models, while Moonshot AI is accused of extracting data from Anthropic's Claude Fable to train its Kimi K3 system. The companies allegedly used fraudulent accounts, bulk premium subscriptions, and proxy routing services to avoid detection and bypass regional restrictions.

The advisory recommends that American AI companies quietly degrade responses for accounts identified with high confidence as conducting malicious distillation rather than simply blocking them outright. The timing lines up with a U.S.-China meeting of the minds scheduled this month, when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to meet with Chinese officials for talks on AI security. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a regular briefing September 9 that she had not seen the report.

This carries immediate implications for U.S.-China AI competition at every level from policy and export controls

Sources

Sources: Northeast Times, Reuters, NBC News, International Business Times, Qz, Help Net Security, Gizmodo, The Hacker News, Daily Caller, hendryadrian.com, Hokanews, beingguru.com, progressiverobot.com. NSA-CISA-FBI joint advisory AA26-251A issued September 8, 2026. Quotes verified across outlets.