Buried in the advice the US government just gave its own AI labs is this
Buried in the advice the US government just gave its own AI labs is this: when you spot an account you think is harvesting your model, do not ban it. Keep answering. Just answer slightly worse, and do not tell them.
On 8 September the NSA, CISA and FBI issued a joint advisory naming six China-based AI firms, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI, and alleging industrial-scale distillation of American frontier models since late 2024. Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok are all named. The scale quoted is millions of exchanges and billions of tokens.
Distillation is worth explaining, because it is not hacking. Nobody breaks in. You open an ordinary account, pay the bill, and ask questions. Ask enough of them and you can train your own model on the answers. You cannot copy the brain. You can only ask until it tells you what it knows.
Which makes the defensive half fascinating. The wording is "subtly alter responses": reduce reasoning depth, reach the right answer by a different route, let the style drift. And then, do not inform the account that it has been downgraded.
Ask enough of them and you can train your own model on the answers.
So when knowledge can be taken by asking, the only way to keep it is to teach slightly badly, and say nothing.
I keep thinking about my own kitchen table. The tutor sitting opposite my two children will be one of these models. This advisory quietly concedes something about that: a system that answers cannot protect what it knows. Knowing the answer has stopped being the advantage. What is left is telling a good answer from a bad one, and knowing what to do with it.
Caveats, plainly: these are allegations, untested in court, and the named firms have not responded point by point. Distillation itself is not illegal; the fight is over terms of service and scale. And the advisory is a US document, written with an industry race in mind.
So: the AI you used this morning. How would you know if it was holding back?
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