The disclosures come as President Donald Trump prepares to discuss AI with Chinese leader Xi Jinping during his Washington visit, later this month (Photo: AP).
Additionally, the agencies claimed that Chinese AI companies rely on a network of intermediaries, described as a “grey market of proxies known as ‘transfer stations'”, to bypass geographic limitations and safety measures put in place by US firms, with Alibaba Group and DeepSeek among the companies named as having run “high-volume knowledge distillation campaigns”. Separately, Anthropic reported that three Chinese AI laboratories had run an “industrial-scale campaign” to extract capabilities from its Claude model, generating over 16 million exchanges through roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts. Adding to these concerns, a Google Threat Intelligence report published the same day found hackers increasingly targeting AI assets, warning that proprietary models and source code have become prime targets for espionage, extortion and resource theft.
The United States on Tuesday accused Chinese Artificial Intelligence firms, including DeepSeek and Alibaba, of stealing trade secrets of their American counterparts to cut development costs and swiftly release coveted technologies to the market.