Why A.I. Distillation Has Become a Hot Topic in the Race with China

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.

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.

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