FBI, NSA and CISA name 6 Chinese AI firms as copying US models since 2024, with no penalty attached

The alert. Three U.S. security agencies — the FBI, the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — issued a joint alert on Tuesday, Sept. 8. It accuses six Chinese AI companies of copying American AI models since 2024: DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI. The agencies said the effort likely ran with Chinese government awareness. They did not allege that Chinese intelligence services ran it. The method. The technical term is "distilling." It means querying a rival's finished model over and over and training your own on its answers, so you buy the output instead of the years of research behind it. The Google report. Separately on the same day, Google reported that a Chinese state-linked group it has tracked since 2023 is installing open-source AI models on hijacked third-party cloud networks — a way to query AI without leaving a trail at a commercial provider — while hitting North American academic, medical and military research targets. (TS: Google's own report says it has not seen a fully automated hacking campaign yet) Where it stands. The advisory, AA26-251A, carries no sanction, no Entity List designation (the Commerce Department's trade blacklist, which blocks U.S. exports to a named firm), no export rule, no prosecution referral and no deadline. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has sued any of the six, so no court has tested the copying claim.

Two of the six were already blacklisted before this alert:

• Zhipu AI, parent of Z.AI, went on the Commerce Entity List in January 2025, in a batch of 25 Chinese companies — the first Chinese large-model firm named.
• Alibaba went on the Pentagon's Section 1260H list of Chinese military companies on June 8, 2026, in a batch of 65 that took the list to 188 names; from June 30, 2026 the Department of War cannot sign or renew contracts with it, a purchasing ban rather than a trade ban.
• DeepSeek was left out of that June 2026 batch. Prediction market Polymarket puts it at 29.5% to be added by June 30, 2027.