People’s Daily rejects US claims of malicious AI distillation, warns of countermeasures

The People's Daily, China's official newspaper, has firmly rejected claims by the United States that Chinese companies engaged in large-scale "distillation" of American artificial intelligence models. In a commentary published on Wednesday, the paper called the allegations "without factual or legal basis" and accused Washington of "politicizing" a normal technical practice.

The strong stance was issued just a week before a scheduled meeting between President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump, which could see AI become a focal point of discussion. The newspaper urged both sides to work together to address risks through dialogue and communication, warning that Beijing would take "countermeasures" if the allegations were used as a pretext to limit Chinese companies.

Distillation is a machine learning technique where a smaller "student" model learns from the outputs of a larger "teacher" model. While the practice is neutral and commonly used, the People's Daily cited instances where American companies had distilled Chinese AI models without naming specific firms. One example is Thinking Machines Lab, co-founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, whose first model Inkling in July used other models, including Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.5, to generate training data.

The commentary emphasized that AI should not be restricted to just "big nations," and criticized the US for expanding restrictive measures from chip controls and computing power blockades to AI model access, driven by "deep-seated anxiety over the potential erosion of its technological dominance." The article challenged allegations made last week by three US government agencies that six Chinese companies - DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba Group Holding, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.ai - conducted "aggressive, malicious and targeted" distillation campaigns of advanced American models, allegedly with Beijing's knowledge.

Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, was one of the companies named. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had previously stated that China could "never get ahead" of the US in AI due to distillation. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has also raised concerns, calling for a crackdown on unauthorized distillation by companies in authoritarian countries, citing a potential grave danger for the US and the world if China leads in AI.