{"id":599041,"date":"2026-07-22T18:59:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T18:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/599041\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T18:59:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T18:59:18","slug":"us-threatens-sanctions-against-chinese-ai-models-over-ip-theft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/599041\/","title":{"rendered":"US threatens sanctions against Chinese AI models over IP theft"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. would examine open source models<\/a> from China for signs of intellectual property theft, threatening sanctions against Chinese AI companies if IP theft is established.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve seen a lot of talk about open source models coming and threatening the large language models in the U.S.,\u201d Bessent said on Fox Business Tuesday. \u201cThis administration supports open source models, but what we do not support is IP theft. If we see, especially, that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bessent\u2019s comments were first reported by Bloomberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The statement comes as Chinese models \u2014 most recently Moonshot AI\u2019s Kimi K3<\/a> \u2014 are gaining in capabilities and popularity, threatening to harm the business models of top American AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as their abilities to raise more capital to continue developing frontier models.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Monday, Axios reported that the Trump administration is considering a wholesale ban on Chinese open source models<\/a>, although others have disputed<\/a> that claim.<\/p>\n

AI companies have been warning for months against campaigns by foreign actors to copy their AI technology and redeploy it as open source. In April, the White House said it would work closely with AI firms to combat the theft.<\/p>\n

Sanctions from the U.S. against Chinese models would add to the growing list of strategies the government is attempting to maintain the lead in the AI race. After restricting China\u2019s access to advanced chips and tightening export controls, Washington is now signaling it may target the AI models themselves, a move that could mark a significant escalation in the technological competition between frontier labs and Chinese open source alternatives.<\/p>\n

Model distillation<\/a> is a technique that allows some of a larger model\u2019s capabilities to be translated into a smaller system that\u2019s easier to run \u2014 but not everyone agrees that distilling another company\u2019s model constitutes theft.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella criticized large labs<\/a> for making just this assumption: \u201cWhile the great innovation that comes from model providers having fair use rights to train models on public data is needed, I find it ironic that the status quo is to then turn around and impose restrictive terms on distillation.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI labs\u2019 training practices continue to be a source of legal risk for the companies. Anthropic this week got the green light to start cutting authors checks as part of its $1.5 billion settlement<\/a> after a judge ruled it had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books to train its AI.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, some in the industry argue that distillation isn\u2019t the only reason China is catching up to U.S. AI companies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know distillation to be a very small factor in the ability to create good models, and it\u2019s a practice that everyone is doing, including companies in the U.S.,\u201d Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said on a recent episode of TechCrunch\u2019s Equity podcast<\/a>. \u201cIf it were easy just to do distillation to get good at building AI models, there would be many other countries, including in the U.S., with much better open source AI. The reality is they have really, really good research teams in China\u2026taking a much more open and collaborative approach to AI than in the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. would examine open source models from China for signs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":599042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,246656,18,19,17,8211,82],"class_list":["post-599041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chinese-ai-models","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-open-source-ai","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116965170356176532","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}