FlagThis — Daily Cybersecurity Intelligence Briefing

The NSA, CISA, and FBI have issued a joint advisory identifying a coordinated, industrial-scale campaign by Chinese AI firms—specifically DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI—to conduct large-scale model theft. The primary attack vector is knowledge distillation, where proprietary intelligence is systematically extracted from U.S. frontier LLMs via high-volume API exploitation. This process involves harvesting billions of tokens to train competitive models, such as Moonshot AI's Kimi-K2 and Kimi-K3, effectively bypassing the massive R&D and compute requirements of original model development.