U.S.-based cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike has warned of increasing cyberattacks from China-based entities aimed at stealing artificial intelligence to narrow the tech gap with the U.S.Bill Hinton | Moment Mobile | Getty ImagesCyberattacks aimed at stealing American artificial intelligence technology are increasingly expanding from tech-based attacks to the exploitation of human-level vulnerabilities, with China-based actors playing a growing role.”As the AI race has heated up, the [People’s Republic of China] has targeted the tech sector increasingly,” said Matt Pearl, director of the strategic technologies program at the U.S.-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.Rather than focusing on a specific trade secret, such as hardware designs, the hackers have broadened their interest to anything that could narrow the three- to four-month AI gap with the U.S., Pearl said. That, he said, ranges from understanding a company’s product roadmap, particularly in highly competitive sectors, to identifying weaknesses in supply chains.The alleged cases are already piling up.In June, U.S.-based cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike said Chinese entities accounted for more than half of state-sponsored intrusions targeting technology companies, especially their AI assets, in the 12 months through March 31.American tech start-up Anthropic has also accused Chinese companies, including Alibaba, of illicit attempts to steal its AI capabilities. Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment.Last year, U.S.-based AI content detection startup Copyleaks said the responses generated by Chinese startup DeepSeek’s R1 model resembled those produced by OpenAI’s ChatGPT nearly three-quarters of the time, suggesting the open-source Chinese model may have been trained on the U.S.-developed one. “We haven’t seen [the same stylistic match] in other LLMs,” said Alon Yamin, CEO and co-founder of Copyleaks.DeepSeek and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Brian Abbott, founder and CEO of U.S.-based start-up Agentiq Capital, told CNBC in June that he believed an employee he hired from Chi …
