--- title: Irony alert: OpenAI whines that Chinese model stole its... description: OpenAI says it disrupted an adversarial model distillation campaign that ran from July 1 to July 28, with spikes of 16,000 requests from over 4,000 users on... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/irony-alert-openai-whines-that-chinese-model-stole-its-special-ip-that-it-stole-from-everybody-else-jnfgociwi twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Irony alert: OpenAI whines that Chinese model stole its special IP that it stole from everybody else | daily.dev og:description: OpenAI says it disrupted an adversarial model distillation campaign that ran from July 1 to July 28, with spikes of 16,000 requests from over 4,000 users on... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/irony-alert-openai-whines-that-chinese-model-stole-its-special-ip-that-it-stole-from-everybody-else-jnfgociwi og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/JNFGoCiwi.png og:image:alt: Irony alert: OpenAI whines that Chinese model stole its special IP that it stole from everybody else og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Irony alert: OpenAI whines that Chinese model stole its special IP that it stole from everybody else **[The Register](https://daily.dev/sources/theregister)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary OpenAI says it disrupted an adversarial model distillation campaign that ran from July 1 to July 28, with spikes of 16,000 requests from over 4,000 users on July 24-25, and identified suspicious activity across more than 15,000 users. It attributes the core cluster to individuals linked to China's Moonshot AI, maker of Kimi, and frames extracting model reasoning at scale as a safety and national security risk. In response, OpenAI banned accounts, tightened signup and infrastructure controls, closed a replay vulnerability in encrypted reasoning, and shared findings via the Frontier Model Forum. The report notes the irony that OpenAI itself trained on vast scraped internet content amid copyright disputes, and that similar distillation accusations against Moonshot have previously come from Google, Anthropic, and US government officials. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What did OpenAI say happened in the Moonshot AI distillation attack on its models in July? OpenAI disrupted a coordinated distillation campaign that ran from July 1 to July 28, where operators manipulated model interactions to reproduce protected reasoning outputs in violation of terms of service. Spikes of 16,000 requests from over 4,000 users occurred on July 24-25, with related prompt-pattern activity spotted across more than 15,000 users overall. _Track how AI labs respond to model-theft incidents like this one on daily.dev._ ### What defense did Anthropic add to Claude Opus 5.5 against model distillation? Anthropic introduced a feature called preserved thinking, first added with Fable 5.1, designed to defend against distillation attacks. It was carried into Claude Opus 5.5, released a week before OpenAI's disclosure of its own distillation incident involving Moonshot AI. _Developers weighing AI model safety trade-offs can follow these defenses on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The US just told China to stop copying its AI. Enforcing that is the hard part.](https://daily.dev/posts/the-us-just-told-china-to-stop-copying-its-ai-enforcing-that-is-the-hard-part--czvehrwnu) · The Next Web · 1 upvotes · 1 comments - [Anthropic accuses Alibaba of using 25,000 fake accounts to scrape Claude AI](https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-accuses-alibaba-of-using-25-000-fake-accounts-to-scrape-claude-ai-wxxhratg1) · InfoWorld · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#machine-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/machine-learning), [#openai](https://daily.dev/tags/openai), [#anthropic](https://daily.dev/tags/anthropic), [#ai-security](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-security), [#moonshot-ai](https://daily.dev/tags/moonshot-ai) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/irony-alert-openai-whines-that-chinese-model-stole-its-special-ip-that-it-stole-from-everybody-else-jnfgociwi) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Irony alert: OpenAI whines that Chinese model stole its special IP that it stole from everybody else","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/irony-alert-openai-whines-that-chinese-model-stole-its-special-ip-that-it-stole-from-everybody-else-jnfgociwi","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/irony-alert-openai-whines-that-chinese-model-stole-its-special-ip-that-it-stole-from-everybody-else-jnfgociwi"},"datePublished":"2026-09-30T21:38:39.314Z","dateModified":"2026-10-06T05:06:07.996Z","description":"OpenAI says it disrupted an adversarial model distillation campaign that ran from July 1 to July 28, with spikes of 16,000 requests from over 4,000 users on...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/89df19da58b8284fa0a5ee4655d2618e?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/89df19da58b8284fa0a5ee4655d2618e?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"The Register","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"The Register","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/66aa2113fdad463992ffcbf0e8963fda","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/theregister"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/irony-alert-openai-whines-that-chinese-model-stole-its-special-ip-that-it-stole-from-everybody-else-jnfgociwi","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"machine-learning,openai,anthropic,ai-security,moonshot-ai","timeRequired":"PT3M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"The Register","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/theregister"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Irony alert: OpenAI whines that Chinese model stole its special IP that it stole from everybody else"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/irony-alert-openai-whines-that-chinese-model-stole-its-special-ip-that-it-stole-from-everybody-else-jnfgociwi#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"What did OpenAI say happened in the Moonshot AI distillation attack on its models in July?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"OpenAI disrupted a coordinated distillation campaign that ran from July 1 to July 28, where operators manipulated model interactions to reproduce protected reasoning outputs in violation of terms of service. 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