China says US accusations of AI theft are ‘groundless’

On Wednesday, China asserted that accusations from the United States regarding Chinese laboratories stealing American AI model capabilities were "groundless", amid a global technology rivalry. The US cyber defense agency had released an advisory on Tuesday, targeting prominent Chinese AI companies such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI for systematically acquiring capabilities through "industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns".

This development preceded an anticipated meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House, where AI could be a key subject of discussion. In response, China's Ministry of Commerce stated on Wednesday that the US accusations were "groundless", describing the US stance as an attempt to gain monopoly through crackdown on distillation.

Distillation, a technique where an AI model is trained to replicate the output of a larger, more capable model, is widely used in the industry, but the US claims Chinese firms have employed it extensively to plagiarize American systems illicitly. The US advisory also highlighted how various Chinese companies, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI, allegedly employed millions of exchanges and requests to extract capabilities from US models like those of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI.

These actions, likely with Chinese government knowledge, have reportedly been happening since late 2024, according to the advisory. The Chinese companies contacted by AFP, excluding StepFun, which was unresponsive, declined to comment. Moonshot AI also chose not to respond. In July, several startups had written to the Trump administration, cautioning against outright bans or stringent restrictions on foreign-made AI models, suggesting such measures should only be considered for government usage.

Beijing also turned the tables by accusing US AI of using Chinese examples to train their models. Upon being questioned about the accusations at a regular briefing on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning urged the United States to "refrain from making unfounded accusations against and smearing China". She added, "Both China and the United States are major players in the AI field. We should strive for stronger cooperation."