U.S. Intelligence Agencies Warn of Chinese AI Companies' Industrial-Scale Theft of American Frontier Models

U.S. intelligence agencies have issued a stark warning that six major Chinese artificial intelligence companies are systematically extracting capabilities from America's most advanced AI models through coordinated, large-scale knowledge distillation campaigns. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, National Security Agency, and Federal Bureau of Investigation released a joint advisory in September 2026 detailing how DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI have extracted billions of AI tokens from U.S. frontier models—including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok—since at least late 2024. The agencies stated that these companies are conducting the campaigns "likely with the knowledge of the Chinese government."