Chinese AI labs are tightening the gap with the US by just being more efficient

Six Chinese AI companies, U.S. officials alleged earlier this week, found a shortcut to closing the gap with American AI labs by buying bulk subscriptions to their American rivals and then training on the outputs. The FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Tuesday that DeepSeek, Moonshot, and four others extracted “capabilities worth billions” in this way since 2024, a method the agencies claimed let DeepSeek understate its $5.6 million training cost. China’s foreign affairs ministry said the country’s AI development “is a result of high-level scientific and technological self-reliance” and called the accusations…