On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on television with a warning for China. On the same day, the chief executive of the company that powers the entire AI boom went the other way.
The threat
Bessent said the US will scrutinise Chinese open-source models for stolen intellectual property, as Bloomberg first reported. It could then hit their makers with sanctions. “This administration supports open source models, but what we do not support is IP theft,” he said.
His evidence is watermarks. “We are finding watermarks of our US large language models on many Chinese models,” he said. The technical term is distillation, training one model on another’s outputs. Bessent called it theft, and promised action within weeks.
What set it off
