In a new Threat Tracker report published Thursday, Google said hackers are engaging in "distillation attacks," including one case in which they used more than 100,000 AI prompts to steal the company's technology for its Gemini AI model.
Google said the attacks seem to be coming from adversaries in countries including North Korea, Russia and China, and that the attempts to steal AI intellectual property and likely clone it into AI models in other languages are part of a broader set of AI-based attacks and malware the company has seen emerge.
The company identifies these attempts as model extraction attacks, which, it says, "occur when an adversary uses legitimate access to systematically probe a mature machine learning model to extract information used to train a new model."
That could mean using AI to flood Gemini with thousands of prompts to replicate its model capabilities. Google noted in the report that this is not a threat to its users, but rather to service providers and model builders, who could be vulnerable to having their work stolen and replicated.
AI competition and AI thievery
John Hultquist, chief analyst for the Google Threat Intelligence Group, which put together the report, told NBC News that Google may be one of the first companies to face these types of theft attempts, but there could be many more. "We're going to be the canary in the coal mine for far more incidents," he said.
The war over AI models has intensified on several fronts, most recently withs Chinese companies such as ByteDance introducing advanced video generation tools. Last year, Chinese AI company DeepSeek rattled the AI industry, which had been primarily led by US companies, by introducing a model that rivaled the world's top AI technology. OpenAI later accused DeepSeek of training its AI on existing technology in ways similar to those described by Google in its new report.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)