Washington, September 8, 2026 — The US National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) jointly published Cybersecurity Advisory AA26-251A on September 8, accusing six Chinese AI firms of running industrial-scale knowledge-distillation campaigns against US frontier models.
The advisory named DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI, alleging that the companies have been extracting restricted proprietary capabilities from models including Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok variants since at least late 2024 — generating billions of tokens across millions of requests.
The advisory urged US providers to harden detection, subtly degrade responses to suspected distillation traffic and share signals across platforms. Anthropic separately claimed three Chinese AI laboratories orchestrated a campaign that generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that "sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table" if Chinese firms continue to engage in such activities. China's Foreign Ministry on September 9 urged the US to "refrain from baseless accusations and smears" and to strengthen AI cooperation rather than confrontation.
