Washington DC - The Trump administration on Tuesday accused top Chinese artificial intelligence firms, including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, of systematically stealing the capability of US-developed models.

A new advisory from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) accuses Chinese companies of widespread theft, via a process known as "distillation," of US artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

"China-based [AI] companies are conducting systematic extraction of proprietary functionalities and capabilities of US AI companies' models," Tuesday's advisory read.

According to CISA, China is committing theft "through industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns that form the core – not merely a supplement – of their AI development strategy."

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Distillation is where an AI model is trained to mimic the output of a larger, more capable one. The method is widely used across the industry, but Washington says Chinese firms have deployed it at scale to illicitly copy American systems.

Chinese companies that adopt this strategy "see significantly shorter AI development timelines and reduced financial expenditures," the advisory said.

It detailed how DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI allegedly used millions of exchanges and requests to steal the capabilities of US models from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI.

These actions, taken "likely with Chinese government awareness," have occurred since at least late 2024, the advisory claimed.

Trump is under pressure to respond to the increasing success of Chinese AI models that many companies prefer to the more powerful, but pricier, US versions from Anthropic or OpenAI.

Washington has made similar claims in the past, regularly painting Chinese advancements in AI as being largely based on technological progress first made by US tech firms.

The CISA advisory comes only weeks ahead of a meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House in September, where AI is likely to be an important discussion topic.