OpenAI disrupted Chinese firm Moonshot AI's attempt to extract model reasoning
OpenAI has identified and disrupted a coordinated campaign to extract protected reasoning from its AI models, linking a core cluster of the activity to Chinese startup Moonshot AI.
Artificial intelligence firm OpenAI said on Thursday it disrupted a coordinated campaign by operators attempting to extract protected reasoning from its AI models, linking a core cluster of the activity to Chinese startup Moonshot AI, the developer of the Kimi model.
The activity began in early July and surged to 16,000 requests from more than 4,000 users over two days, OpenAI stated. The company ultimately identified related activity across a cluster of over 15,000 users and said it had fully disrupted the campaign by July 28.
The findings emerge weeks after rival Anthropic accused several Chinese AI developers, including Moonshot AI and Alibaba, of secretly using its Claude model to train their own AI systems. This underscores growing concerns among U.S. AI companies that rivals could leverage their models to develop competing technology more quickly and cheaply.
OpenAI described the activity as "adversarial distillation," where one AI model's outputs or reasoning are used to train another model. Extracting such reasoning could allow others to reproduce advanced capabilities without making the same investment in developing and safeguarding frontier models, posing potential safety and national security risks. The company confirmed that operators did not breach its encryption, databases, or stored user conversations.