How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

Two of the world's biggest AI companies, Google and OpenAI, both warned this week that competitors including China's DeepSeek are probing their models to steal the underlying reasoning, and then copy these capabilities in their own AI systems.

"This is coming from threat actors throughout the globe," Google Threat Intelligence Group chief analyst John Hultquist told The Register, adding that the perpetrators are "private-sector companies." He declined to name specific companies or countries involved in this type of intellectual property theft.

"Your model is really valuable IP, and if you can distill the logic behind it, there's very real potential that you can replicate that technology – which is not inexpensive," Hultquist said. "This is such an important technology, and the list of interested parties in replicating it are endless."

Google calls this process of using prompts to clone its models "distillation attacks," and in a Thursday report ...