U.S. Accuses China of Industrial-Scale AI Theft; Beijing Dismisses Claims as Unfounded

The U.S. government has formally accused six major Chinese artificial intelligence companies of systematically extracting proprietary capabilities from American frontier AI models through a coordinated, large-scale knowledge distillation campaign since late 2024. The FBI, National Security Agency, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a joint cybersecurity advisory on September 8, 2026, naming DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI as the primary actors in what officials characterize as a strategic effort to bypass expensive model development and accelerate China's AI capabilities.