China says US accusations of AI theft are 'groundless'

China said on Wednesday that US accusations of Chinese labs stealing the capabilities of American models were "groundless", as the two countries race for tech supremacy.

The US cyber defense agency released an advisory on Tuesday accusing top Chinese AI labs including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI of systematically stealing the capabilities "through industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns".

It came ahead of an expected meeting this month between President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at the White House, where AI could be an important discussion topic.

China hit back on Wednesday, calling the accusations "groundless".

"The US approach is a typical case of using the crackdown on distillation as a pretext to achieve industrial monopoly," the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement.

The US accusations are a "case of double standards", it added.

Distillation is where an AI model is trained to mimic the output of a larger, more capable one.

The method is widely used across the industry, but Washington says Chinese firms have deployed it at scale to illicitly copy American systems.

The US advisory also detailed how DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI allegedly used millions of exchanges and requests to steal the capabilities of US models from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI.

Chinese companies that adopt this strategy "see significantly shorter AI development timelines and reduced financial expenditures in training a frontier model", the advisory said.

These actions, taken "likely with Chinese government awareness", have occurred since at least late 2024, it said.

AFP contacted the Chinese companies apart from StepFun, which was not immediately reachable. Moonshot AI declined to comment.

Trump is under pressure to respond to the increasing success of Chinese AI models that many companies prefer to the more powerful, but pricier, US versions from Anthropic or OpenAI.

In July, dozens of startups wrote a letter to the Trump administration urging it to think twice against any outright ban or strict curbs on foreign-made AI models, saying this should only be considered for government use of the technology.

That month, Beijing also turned the tables by accusing US AI of using Chinese examples to train their models.

Asked about the accusations at a regular briefing on Wednesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said the United States should "refrain from making unfounded accusations against and smearing China".

"The development of artificial intelligence in China is the result of achieving high-level self-reliance and strength in science and technology," she said.

"Both China and the United States are major countries in the field of AI. We should strengthen cooperation."

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