US accuses China of copying AI models, China hits back

Three U.S. security agencies have come together to accuse Chinese leading AI developers of intentionally copying American AI models in a joint advisory released on Tuesday. Beijing rejected the allegations today, with the dispute landing some days before President Donald Trump is expected to host Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington.

The joint advisory released by the FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency stated that Chinese firms had been taking capabilities from U.S. frontier AI systems since late 2024. These agencies claimed that Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok have been targets of the “distillation” technique, where a smaller model is trained on the outputs of a larger, more capable model to replicate its behavior.

The agencies acknowledged that distillation was a standard, widely used method in AI research, however, they claim the issue lies in the scale and intent from the Chinese firms.

“The sheer scale of these campaigns and their sophistication indicate that distillation is not a supplement to these companies’ AI model development, but the critical core of it,” the advisory said. The agencies also added that the activity was carried out “likely with Chinese government awareness,” although they stopped short of claiming Chinese intelligence services were involved.

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