AI agent incident

CISA, NSA and FBI named six China-based firms running distillation campaigns against US models

Reported · 2 sources

What happened

A joint CISA, NSA and FBI advisory said China-based companies including DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI ran industrial-scale distillation attacks against US frontier models through API abuse. Anthropic separately said it disrupted the same activity from seven China-based labs.

Why it matters

The abuse looked like ordinary paid API traffic, which is why it ran at that scale. The agencies' own mitigation is a ratio check, subscription level against actual usage, plus an end to bulk credential sharing.

Sources

  1. CISA China-Based Artificial Intelligence Companies Conducting Industrial-Scale Distillation Campaigns Against U.S. AI Companies
  2. The Hacker News Anthropic Says Seven China-Based AI Labs Ran Industrial-Scale Claude Distillation Attacks

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Cite or correct this record

“CISA, NSA and FBI named six China-based firms running distillation campaigns against US models.” The Permission Layer AI Agent Incident Database, https://thepermissionlayer.com/incidents/china-distillation-advisory/. Database updated October 22, 2026.

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