China rejects US accusation that Chinese AI firms distilled American models

US agencies named DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI and Z.ai in advisory

China on Wednesday rejected a joint US cybersecurity advisory that accused Chinese artificial intelligence developers of running “aggressive, malicious” industrial-scale efforts to extract capabilities from frontier American AI systems.

The FBI, the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued the advisory on Tuesday.

The advisory said Chinese AI developers had extracted, or “distilled,” capabilities from four US frontier AI models — Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini and SpaceXAI’s Grok — “since at least late 2024.”

The advisory named four Chinese AI developers — DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI and Z.ai — and said the activities were done “likely with Chinese government awareness.”

In Beijing, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs pushed back against the advisory on Wednesday.

The ministry urged the United States to “refrain from making unfounded accusations or smears” against China.

The ministry added that both China and the United States are major AI powers and said the two sides should strengthen cooperation.

The advisory was issued jointly by the FBI, NSA and CISA.