China calls US accusations of AI technology theft ‘baseless’

SAN FRANCISCO – Beijing on April 24 refuted accusations made by the White House the previous day that Chinese entities were involved in “industrial-scale” efforts to steal US artificial intelligence technology.

“The US claims are entirely baseless. They are a slanderous smear against the achievements of China’s artificial intelligence industry. China firmly opposes this,” Mr Guo Jiakun, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said at a regular news conference.

The White House on April 23 also vowed to take action to prevent the alleged theft.

“The US has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI,” White House science and technology chief Michael Kratsios said in a post on social media platform X.

“We will be taking action to protect American innovation.”

Distillation is a common practice within AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models.

In February, US AI developer Anthropic accused three Chinese firms – DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax – of running campaigns to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, describing it as intellectual property theft.

That same month, ChatGPT creator OpenAI sent a letter to US legislators accusing DeepSeek of using distillation techniques amid “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs”.

Mr Kratsios did not name any specific foreign entities in his post but said they “are using tens of thousands of proxies and jailbreaking techniques in coordinated campaigns to systematically extract American breakthroughs”.

The accusations come ahead of a planned May 14 summit in Beijing between US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. AFP