China’s foreign ministry has rejected the joint US intelligence advisory accusing Chinese developers of extracting capabilities from American frontier models at industrial scale, calling on Washington to stop making unfounded accusations and smears.
Mao Ning, a ministry spokesperson, said China’s AI development is the result of high-level technological self-reliance and strength, according to accounts of her remarks. The response was reported on Wednesday, a day after the advisory was published.
We reported the advisory when it appeared. The NSA, FBI, and CISA named six Chinese companies, listed which American model each was said to have targeted, and described distillation as the core of how those companies build rather than a supplement to it. The document also disputed the training cost figure that made DeepSeek famous.
Note what the rejection does not do. It does not address any of the per-company allegations, does not dispute the technical account of how requests were routed, and does not respond to the claim about bulk-purchased premium subscriptions shared across teams.
It asserts self-reliance as a matter of national principle, the same framing Beijing used when the accusation was first made by the White House earlier this year. That is a diplomatic answer to a technical document, which is the normal shape of these exchanges and is also why they never resolve anything.
