US accuses China of “industrial-scale” AI theft. China says it’s “slander.”

The US is preparing to crack down on China's alleged "industrial-scale theft of American artificial intelligence labs’ intellectual property," according to the Financial Times. This comes after OpenAI claimed a Chinese model, DeepSeek, was trained using its outputs, and Google reported attempts to clone its Gemini AI chatbot. Anthropic accused Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of generating "over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts" using distillation tactics. Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, warned in a memo that foreign entities, principally from China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems. These alleged distillation attacks threaten to help China quickly catch up in the AI race.