Report claims China is distilling U.S. frontier models to power military AI applications
An exclusive report by Reuters today has surfaced evidence that suggests Chinese artificial intelligence firms have been leveraging the outputs of American frontier models developed by OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC to train their own AI systems for defense applications.
The review by Reuters included a detailed examination of more than 80 academic papers and patent applications published by Chinese researchers, and found that multiple institutions linked to the military have been harvesting the outputs of U.S. models. The report claims that China is doing this to get around Washington’s aggressive export controls, which have prevented its startups from accessing the advanced chips needed to create more sophisticated AI models from scratch.
Reuters said it conducted the review with the Washington D.C.-based defense policy thinktank Jamestown Foundation. Its findings suggest that Chinese researchers are increasingly hijacking the work of America’s best known AI startups in order to build advanced systems that power military applications.
The report accuses Chinese researchers of misusing a technique known as “model distillation,” which refers to a process that involves taking the outputs, reasoning steps and data from powerful “teacher models” and using them to train smaller, more specialized “student” models. Through model distillation, it’s possible to create smaller models that can run more efficiently on less powerful hardware. The result is that China has been able to develop numerous models that match the performance of OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s most advanced frontier models despite using far less computational resources.
