Washington accuses Chinese AI firms of ‘systematic’ theft

The United States has accused prominent Chinese artificial intelligence labs, including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, of systematically stealing the capabilities of American AI models, according to an advisory released on Tuesday. This comes as the two nations compete for technological dominance. The warning from the US cyber defense agency arrives ahead of an anticipated meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House, where AI could be a key point of discussion.

Previous accusations of Chinese AI theft through a process called distillation, a technique where an AI model is trained to replicate the output of a larger, more capable one, have been made by the US government and American AI companies. The advisory states that Chinese AI companies are carrying out industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns that are central, not peripheral, to their AI development strategy.

Distillation allows Chinese firms to significantly reduce the time and financial costs involved in training a top-tier model. Specifically, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI are alleged to have used millions of exchanges and requests to illicitly copy capabilities from US models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI.

These actions, likely with Chinese government knowledge, have been ongoing since at least late 2024. Chinese companies were contacted for comment, but Moonshot AI declined to respond. The accusations follow a July letter from dozens of startups urging the Trump administration to reconsider banning or heavily restricting foreign-made AI models, arguing such measures should only apply to government use.

Beijing also responded by accusing US AI companies of using Chinese examples to train their models. When questioned about the accusations, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman stated that the US should refrain from making "unfounded accusations against and smearing China," asserting that China's AI development is a result of self-reliance and technological strength.