Jensen Huang says AI distillation is 'competition.' Scott Bessent has called it 'theft'

Summary

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said AI model distillation, where models are trained on other models' outputs, is "competition," disputing the White House's characterization of it as theft. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called it "theft" in July and threatened sanctions against overseas companies using it to extract capability from U.S.-built models. CISA accused Chinese AI companies of "industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns," and Anthropic said it found Alibaba and DeepSeek engaging in "illicit distillation"; China has rejected the claims.

Mitigation

Huang said that if companies do not want people to use their products, they should "know your customers, and disable the service."

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