OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — the three companies at the front of the global AI race — have formally begun sharing intelligence with each other through the Frontier Model Forum to counter what they call adversarial distillation attempts by Chinese AI firms. The coalition was disclosed between 6 and 7 April 2026, and it represents one of the first substantive cooperative security actions the three rivals have taken against a common external threat.
What’s being defended
Adversarial distillation is the practice of using commercial API access to a frontier model to query it millions of times with carefully crafted prompts, then using the responses to train a smaller model that closely mimics the original’s capabilities. The technique is cheap relative to training a frontier model from scratch, and it effectively extracts the labour and capital embedded in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s multi-billion-dollar training runs.
The scale
The numbers Anthropic disclosed are large. The company identified 16 million unauthorised exchanges traced back to three named Chinese firms — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — across roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts. OpenAI and Google have not published their equivalent figures but have confirmed the pattern is comparable. The activity escalated sharply in late 2025 and early 2026, coinciding with public releases of frontier models from all three US labs.
Why this matters
The coalition matters for two reasons. First, it signals that the US frontier labs now view model theft as a strategic national-competitiveness issue, not a commercial one. Second, it upends the industry narrative of unbridled US-on-US competition: for the first time since ChatGPT launched, three companies worth roughly $2 trillion combined are sharing abuse signals with each other in real time.
What it doesn’t solve
Export controls remain the main US policy lever, and Chinese labs have consistently found workarounds. The Frontier Model Forum intelligence-sharing programme is a defensive posture, not an offensive one. It will slow the pace of Chinese model catch-up but cannot reverse it. Each new frontier model released in the United States will remain the single most valuable target for distillation — and the next round of this cat-and-mouse starts the day it ships.
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