Google has relied on a tremendous amount of material without permission to train its Gemini AI models. The company, alongside many of its competitors in the AI space, has been indiscriminately scraping the internet for content, without compensating rightsholders, racking up many copyright infringement lawsuits along the way.
But when it comes to its own tech being copied, Google has no problem pointing fingers. This week, the company accused “commercially motivated” actors of trying to clone its Gemini AI.
In a Thursday report, Google complained it had become under “distillation attacks,” with agents querying Gemini up to 100,000 times to “extract” the underlying model — the convoluted AI industry equivalent of copying somebody’s homework, basically.
Google called the attacks a “method of intellectual property theft that violates Google’s terms of service” — which, let’s face it, is a glaring double standard given its callous approach to scraping other IP without remuneration.
Google remained vague on who it identified as the culprits, beyond pointing out “private sector entities” and “researchers seeking to clone proprietary logic.”
The stakes are high, as companies continue to pour tens of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure to make models more powerful. It’s no wonder Google is scared to lose its competitive edge as offerings start to converge at the head of the pack. The output of one pioneering model has become almost indistinguishable from another, forcing companies to try to differentiate their products.
It’s far from the first time the subject of model distillation has caused drama. Chinese startup DeepSeek rattled Silicon Valley to its core in early 2025 after showing off a far cheaper and more efficient AI model. At the time, OpenAI suggested DeepSeek may have broken its terms of service by distilling its AI models.
The ChatGPT maker quickly became the subject of widespread mockery following the comments, with netizens accusing the company of hypocrisy, pointing out that OpenAI itself had indiscriminately ripped off other people’s work for many years.
Google’s latest troubles likely won’t be the last time we hear about smaller actors trying to extract mainstream AI models through distillation.
Google’s Threat Intelligence Group chief analyst John Hultquist told NBC News that “we’re going to be the canary in the coal mine for far more incidents.”
But whether they’ll be able to defend themselves in the coming months and years remains uncertain. AI companies remain significantly exposed since their models are available for public use.
“Historically, adversaries seeking to steal high-tech capabilities used conventional computer-enabled intrusion operations to compromise organizations and steal data containing trade secrets,” Google’s report reads. “For many AI technologies where LLMs are offered as services, this approach is no longer required; actors can use legitimate API access to attempt to ‘clone’ select AI model capabilities.”
Google outlined one case study, after finding that attackers were using “over 100,000 prompts,” suggesting an “attempt to replicate Gemini’s reasoning ability in non-English target languages across a wide variety of tasks.”
However, the company’s systems “recognized this attack in real time and lowered the risk of this particular attack.”
It’s a particularly vulnerable point in time as AI companies are desperately trying to find a way of monetizing the tech through a variety of revenue drivers, from pricey subscription models to ads. With far lower upfront costs, it’s entirely possible that much smaller entities could break through, not unlike what we saw with DeepSeek in early 2025.
More on distillation: AI Companies Tremble as They Realize It’s Easy for Competitors to Steal Their Super-Expensive Work for Pennies on the Dollar