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OpenAI announced that it had identified and disrupted a coordinated campaign in which operators sought to extract protected inferences from its artificial intelligence models, linking a core cluster of operations to Moonshot AI, the Chinese startup that developed Kimi.
OpenAI said the activity began in early July, with requests from more than 4,000 users mushrooming to 16,000 in the next two days. The company ultimately identified related activity across a cluster of more than 15,000 users, and by July 28th announced it had permanently suspended the campaign.
The findings come weeks after OpenAI rival Anthropic accused several Chinese AI developers, including Moonshot AI and Alibaba, of secretly using its Claude models to train their AI systems, highlighting growing concerns among U.S. AI companies that rivals could use their models to develop competing technologies faster and cheaper.
OpenAI describes its latest activity as “adversarial distillation,” in which the output and inferences of one AI model are used to train and improve another model. The company said that drawing such inferences could allow other companies to reproduce advanced features without making the same investments in developing and protecting the Frontier model, posing potential safety and national security risks.
The company said its operators did not compromise OpenAI’s encryption, database, or stored user conversations. Instead, they manipulated interactions with that model to reproduce the hidden inferences in a form visible to the requester.
OpenAI said it is unclear whether all operators involved are related to a single actor, but the core cluster of activity is from individuals associated with Moonshot AI. The company said it shared its results with other AI developers through the Frontier Model Forum and government information sharing channels.
Moonshot did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
