US Accuses China of Industrial-Scale AI Theft; Beijing Calls It Slander

A Financial Times report reveals that the U.S. is preparing to tackle what it views as China's extensive theft of intellectual property from American AI labs. OpenAI claimed that the new AI tool DeepSeek was built using its data, prompting other companies to accuse global rivals of using distillation methods to steal their innovations. In January, Google disclosed that there were over 100,000 attempts to duplicate its Gemini AI chatbot, with actors from various locations, including China. By February, Anthropic pointed fingers at Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax for generating over 16 million interactions with their AI, Claude, through around 24,000 fake accounts. OpenAI indicated that most of these incidents traced back to China. Michael Kratsios from the White House warned about systematic efforts from foreign entities, mainly Chinese, to extract U.S. AI technology. China has denied these claims, labeling them as slanderous.