US accuses Chinese tech firm of copying from American companies

The US government acuses Chinese artificial intelligence companies of maliciously copying technology from American AI firms, naming six firms including Alibaba, Moonshot AI and Deepseek.

According to a statement from U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials, Chinese companies copied US AI labs' intellectual property through a technique known as distillation, 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.

The statement furthers that the companies did so "likely with Chinese government awareness," whiel targeting AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Alphabet's Google and SpaceX.