Accusations against Chinese tech companies of illicit activity are not new, especially from the US. Still, the last few days have seen a remarkable escalation in how Washington and Silicon Valley are calling out China’s AI industry, most notably on the controversial issue of AI model distillation — the alleged practice of Chinese companies “stealing” the outputs of US AI models to train their own.
On Tuesday, three US government agencies including the FBI and the NSA accused six Chinese companies of engaging in an industrial campaign to steal US model outputs, “likely with Chinese government awareness”. The report from leading US law enforcement and intelligence agencies was soon followed by a report from leading US AI company Anthropic, which claimed that its Chinese AI rivals including national champions DeepSeek and Moonshot covertly routed customer requests to its Claude models and passed those responses as their own. #🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖
AI and legal experts say that the claims mark a new intensity in US criticism of China’s AI industry, given the unprecedented detail provided in the reports and the significance of the agencies behind them.
What is notable is that Chinese AI companies accused of such malpractice have largely stayed mum about these allegations. Instead, they have left it to officials in Beijing to respond, with China’s Ministry of Commerce saying on Wednesday that Washington is using these allegations to unfairly suppress China’s AI industry.
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