CISA warns of industrial-scale China AI distillation

CISA, NSA and the FBI warned on September 8, 2026 that China-based AI companies have run industrial-scale knowledge-distillation campaigns against US frontier models since at least late 2024. The agencies named DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI as extracting billions of tokens across millions of requests from Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok variants, in violation of US providers' terms of service. They urged US labs to detect anomalous accounts, degrade suspected distillation traffic and share intelligence across providers.