American labs say China’s AI tigers are copycats

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.AMERICA’S TOP artificial-intelligence labs have accused their Chinese rivals of being ruthless copycats. This month Anthropic and OpenAI each disclosed evidence that leading Chinese AI labs have illicitly used American models to train their own. The firms accuse Chinese researchers of aggressively “distilling” American chatbots—feeding them prompts in order to learn from and mimic their responses.

“China is, in effect, stealing the weights of our best AI models,” says Chris McGuire of the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank. “These are among the most valuable assets on earth.”Such claims are not new. OpenAI accused DeepSeek of similar behaviour early last year, after the Chinese lab shocked Silicon Valley with the release of its R1 model.

Since then Chinese firms have unveiled models that rival American chatbots on certain metrics, with as little as a few weeks’ delay, while being cheaper to train and run. Anthropic’s claim on February 23rd that three leading Chinese firms have secretly tried to emulate its chatbot helps to explain how they have kept pace. American labs say Chinese competitors use “distillation attacks” to jump closer to the frontier of model development for just a fraction of the cost.AI labs have closely watched rivals’ efforts to train on their products over recent months.

Anthropic’s disclosure comes as the industry awaits DeepSeek’s newest model, which could appear as soon as next week. According to Reuters, the Trump administration believes DeepSeek trained the system in a facility in Inner Mongolia on Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell chips, in violation of export controls. DeepSeek is said to be planning to hide its use of the chips, potentially