The U.S. May Impose Sanctions On China

For stealing an AI model.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that President Donald Trump's administration will investigate whether Chinese artificial intelligence models were developed based on American models. This was reported by CNBC.

If these facts are confirmed, Washington may impose sanctions, Bessent said.

“If we see that, in particular, foreign companies are stealing from our major companies, we have the ability to impose sanctions against them in connection with this theft,” the U.S. Treasury Secretary said on Fox Business.

According to him, the technical term for this phenomenon is “distillation.” It is a method of training artificial intelligence in which a smaller model is created based on the responses or results of a more powerful model.

Bessent also stated that the U.S. side is already detecting signs of the use of its own technologies in Chinese developments.

“We are finding traces of our major American language models in many Chinese models, and this is unacceptable. We’ll be addressing this in the coming days or weeks,” he said.

As CNBC notes, Chinese AI models have recently been competing more aggressively with products from U.S. companies OpenAI and Anthropic. Earlier this year, Anthropic stated that three Chinese AI companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax—had used its chatbot Claude to improve their own models.

In July, the startup Moonshot AI unveiled the Kimi K3 model, which, according to the results of a series of industry tests, outperforms solutions from its American competitors.

Last month, Anthropic addressed the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Development, stating that the Chinese company Alibaba had carried out “the largest known attack using distillation” against its models.

According to Reuters, the U.S. and China plan to hold talks on artificial intelligence in September. Bessent is expected to lead the U.S. delegation at these talks.

At the same time, CNBC notes that U.S. AI developers themselves have faced accusations of copyright infringement. Specifically, last year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion as part of a settlement in a class-action lawsuit filed by writers who claimed the company had illegally downloaded books from pirated databases.

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