US artificial intelligence developers accuse Chinese firms of stealing their data
US artificial intelligence developers accuse Chinese firms of stealing their data
Publish Date: 2026-02-26 05:11:00
Source Domain: www.computerweekly.com
US artificial intelligence (AI) developers are sounding the alarm about “industrial scale” distillation attacks by Chinese labs looking to exfiltrate a variety of data from their models, but those same firms have also been widely accused of using others’ data without permission to train the models in the first place.
Distillation techniques are a common method for training AI, whereby small models are trained on the outputs of larger, more advanced models in an effort to replicate their performance and behaviour.
While distillation techniques allow AI labs to create smaller, more tailored models for customers at a much cheaper cost, US firms are worried the adversarial use of such methods by Chinese competitors presents a fundamental risk to their businesses.
In a blog post about detecting and preventing such attacks, AI developer Anthropic accused three Chinese firms – DeepSeek, MiniMax Group Inc and Moonshot AI – of violating its terms of service by collectively creating more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts, which were then used to generate more than 16 million exchanges with its publicly available Claude models.
“Distillation is a widely used and legitimate training method,” it said. “For example, frontier AI labs routinely distill their own models to create smaller, cheaper versions for their customers. But distillation can also be used for illicit purposes: competitors can use it to acquire powerful capabilities from other labs in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it would take to develop them independently.”
It further warned that, because such campaigns are “growing in intensity and sophistication”, addressing the threat to US artificial intelligence companies “will require rapid, coordinated action among industry players, policymakers and the global AI community”.
OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT, has also recently flagged the threat of model distillation to US lawmakers, warning that DeepSeek had…
