The Chinese companies copied US AI labs’ intellectual property through a technique known as distillation, according to a statement from US law enforcement and intelligence officials.
A photo taken on April 1, 2025 shows the GPT chat logo on a laptop screen (right) next to the logo of Deepseek AI application on a smartphone screen in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany. (AFP/Kirill Kudryavtsev)
The US government on Tuesday accused Chinese artificial intelligence companies of maliciously copying technology from American AI firms, potentially complicating relations ahead of a planned meeting between leaders of the world's two biggest economies later this month.The Chinese companies copied US AI labs’ intellectual property through a technique known as distillation, according to a statement from US law enforcement and intelligence officials. Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones as part of an effort to lower the costs of training a new AI tool.
US officials accused six Chinese companies, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Alibaba, of tapping variants of American-made AI models to train their AI products more quickly. The companies did so "likely with Chinese government awareness," according to the statement from US officials, who added that the Chinese companies targeted AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Alphabet's Google and SpaceX.
