US accuses Chinese AI firms of ‘malicious’ copying of AI technology

WASHINGTON – US cyber and law enforcement officials accused Chinese AI companies on Sept 8 of maliciously copying technology from sophisticated American-made AI models through a technique known as distillation, according to a statement from three US security agencies. Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones as part of an effort to lower the cost of training a new AI tool. The US officials accused China’s DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax and StepFun of using variants of American-made AI models to train their AI products, according to a statement from the…