A joint FBI, NSA, and CISA advisory published in early September 2026 accuses six Chinese AI companies — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI — of systematically copying American AI models since 2024 through a technique called distillation. The agencies say the firms extracted outputs from models including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok to build their own systems, often evading geographic and usage restrictions. Chinese officials dismissed the accusations as ‘groundless,’ asserting their AI development reflects domestic technological self-reliance.
