Bessent says U.S. could sanction China over AI model 'theft'

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that the Trump administration is investigating whether Chinese AI models have used distillation (an AI training method where a smaller model is built using outputs from a stronger existing model) to copy American AI models, and suggested the U.S. could impose sanctions if this 'theft' is confirmed. The concern stems from Chinese AI companies like Moonshot AI releasing competitive open-weight models (models whose trained parameters are publicly released) that perform well against American companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.