U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that the Trump administration will investigate whether Chinese artificial intelligence models have been derived from American models, emphasizing that the government does not support "IP theft":
Chinese open-weight models are rapidly gaining traction against leading offerings from American companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. "If we see that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft," Bessent told Fox Business:
He noted that the technical term for this theft is "distillation," which is an AI training method where a smaller, less capable model is built using outputs from an existing, stronger model:
The U.S. and China are set to hold talks around AI in September, with Bessent representing the U.S.:
