Six Chinese AI firms accused of aggressively copying US frontier models

The NSA, CISA and FBI allege that six Chinese AI companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI—have conducted industrial-scale distillation of U.S. frontier models such as Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since at least late 2024, allegedly with Chinese government awareness. The agencies say this practice shortens development timelines and cuts billions of dollars in training costs for the Chinese firms.