Are Chinese AI systems unfairly copying US AI systems?
The NewYorkTimes.com reported that “The American companies building artificial intelligence systems are loudly complaining that their Chinese competitors are unfairly copying their technology, and they are pleading with officials to do something about it.” The July 6, 2026 article entitled “American A.I. Companies Say Chinese Copycats Are Quickly Catching Up” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/technology/ai-distillation-china.html) included these comments from Reporter Cade Metz:
On June 10, Anthropic sent a letter to Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, accusing the Chinese tech giant Alibaba of surreptitiously copying its A.I. technologies using a technique called distillation.
Like other Chinese companies, Alibaba tapped into Anthropic’s technologies through tens of thousands of unauthorized accounts, according to the letter, which was viewed by The New York Times. Then it used the data it collected to train its own A.I. systems. Anthropic asked the lawmakers, who lead a Senate committee that was about to hold a hearing on A.I., to explore ways of curbing China’s distillation.
“These distillation attacks are carried out illicitly, systematically and at industrial scale to harvest U.S. A.I. capabilities across frontier labs and repackage them as their own,” Anthropic told the two senators, referring to companies on the frontier of A.I. development.
Experts say China trails the United States in A.I. development by just six months. Anthropic and other U.S. companies argue that without help from distillation, China would be much further behind, which could affect major A.I. uses like business planning, drug research, mass surveillance and military weapons.
Their complaints have new urgency now that the Chinese start-up Z.ai has released an A.I. model, GLM-5.2, that is nearly as powerful as the top American systems. It rivals them when used for cybersecurity, an area that American A.I. companies and the Trump administration have singled out as vitally important to geopolitics.
But what exactly is distillation, and are Chinese companies the only ones doing it? Here is an explanation.
Not at all. Distillation has been common in the tech industry for more than a decade. A small team of Google researchers first developed the technique in the early 2010s as a way of building more efficient A.I. systems.
Through distillation, researchers can collect data from a particularly powerful system and use that data to build a system that can run on less expensive hardware.
Anyone surprised?