BREAKING: US agencies allege industrial-scale model distillation by six China-based AI companies

BREAKING · Originally published 8 September 2026 · 19:56 BST · Updated 9 September 2026 · Europe/London

US agencies allege industrial-scale model distillation by six China-based AI companies

The US National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a joint cybersecurity advisory alleging that six China-based AI companies conducted industrial-scale knowledge-distillation campaigns against US AI companies.

The advisory names DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI. It alleges that the companies extracted billions of tokens across millions of exchanges from US frontier AI models since at least late 2024. These are US government allegations, not findings established by a court or independently proven by SEPIDRA.

Key confirmed facts

• The joint advisory names six companies: DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI.
• The agencies characterise the alleged activity as aggressive, malicious and industrial-scale knowledge distillation.
• Knowledge distillation is a legitimate machine-learning technique; the dispute concerns allegedly unauthorised extraction, access and use.

What remains uncertain or disputed

The agencies’ attribution, scale assessment and claim of likely Chinese government awareness remain allegations by US authorities. Responses from every named company and the Chinese government were not available in the source material reviewed for this update.

Sources

Primary source: joint NSA, CISA and FBI advisory
Primary source: NSA statement
Independent reporting: Reuters

Correction

An earlier version of this article stated that the agencies named five companies and omitted Z.AI. The joint advisory names six. The headline, summary and body were corrected on 9 September 2026.