China Distills U.S. AI Models

U.S. agencies say Chinese AI firms ran millions of routed queries against leading U.S. models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok) to extract behaviors and generate synthetic training data, then used that material to train their own frontier models. The firms allegedly used account‑spreading, proxies, third‑party aggregators and cloud hops to evade detection and terms‑of‑service limits. — If true, industrial‑scale distillation creates a practical leak vector for frontier AI capabilities that undermines export controls, reshapes AI industrial policy, and raises new surveillance and legal questions about model access and misuse.