The U.S. is discussing restrictions on Chinese AI models
The U.S. is considering imposing restrictions on Chinese companies—developers of artificial intelligence models—and their products. DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen, Z.ai’s GLM, and Moonshot AI’s Kimi have become the focus of the discussion, according to Channel NewsAsia.
U.S. officials are raising questions about the origin of the technologies used by some Chinese developers. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened China with sanctions in July. According to the publication, Washington is also evaluating the possibility of a ban or restrictions on foreign models with open weights, which are often created using distillation.
Distillation is a common method in the industry whereby one AI model is trained based on another. U.S. officials claim that Chinese companies may have used this approach on a large scale to illegally copy proprietary American systems. China’s Ministry of Commerce has rejected the U.S. allegations, stating that they lack factual and legal basis, and has pledged to defend the country’s legitimate rights and interests.
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The latest accusations from the U.S. side concern Moonshot AI, which develops the Kimi models. According to U.S. officials, the company improperly used distillation of one of Anthropic’s most advanced models to create Kimi K3. Pedro Domingos, professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, noted that it is difficult to define the line beyond which distillation constitutes an infringement of intellectual property rights.
At the same time, part of the U.S. tech industry opposes restricting access to Chinese models. Amjad Masad, CEO and co-founder of Replit, said that the company’s engineers work with both American models—including Anthropic’s Claude—and Chinese models, such as GLM. The Little Tech Association has called on the Trump administration not to block Chinese models with open weights, as the organization believes this could concentrate demand for AI among a few companies with closed models, drive up prices, and limit the development of new products.
