U.S. agencies say top Chinese AI companies systematically copied American models

In an alert published Tuesday , the FBI, the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said top Chinese AI companies have systematically mined cutting-edge AI models from American companies since 2024, including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok, to build their own.

A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The practice, known as distillation, is widespread in the AI industry, though it is often against AI companies’ terms of service. American companies and government officials have increasingly alleged in recent months that Chinese models are built by distilling American ones.

The U.S. has accused China for years of stealing intellectual property from American companies. Tuesday’s report said the distillation campaign had come “likely with Chinese government awareness,” but it did not claim that China’s intelligence played a role.

The White House frequently describes the U.S. as racing China to develop the most cutting-edge AI. President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sept. 24. Officials from both governments have traded barbs in recent weeks over whether China has been inappropriately stealing AI trade secrets.

The report accused six of the leading Chinese AI developers: DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI. It goes into significant detail, including a long list alleging that certain Chinese models distilled specific topics, like “legal specialization optimization,” “agentic functions” and “coach/assistant capabilities,” from particular American models.

“The sheer scale of these campaigns and their sophistication indicate that distillation is not a supplement to these companies’ AI model development, but the critical core of it,” the report said.

American companies have made scattered accusations of distillation since at least last year, when OpenAI said DeepSeek had “inappropriately” based its model on ChatGPT. In February, Google said it was inundated with attempts to clone Gemini but declined to name a suspect.