(Bloomberg) -- China said it's willing to hold talks with the US on artificial intelligence, but vowed to retaliate if Washington takes actions against Chinese companies over accusations of systematic technology theft.
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The Commerce Ministry in Beijing on Wednesday hit back against US security agencies' claims that China's top AI firms have extracted proprietary knowledge from American labs "at an industrial scale," slamming the accusation as groundless.
"China is willing to hold constructive and professional discussions with the US through dialogue on the principles of equality and mutual benefit, cooperation and win-win outcomes," a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, citing an agreement between both countries' leaders to establish such a dialogue.
"But if the US takes action to contain and suppress Chinese artificial intelligence companies in the name of combating distillation, China will resolutely take countermeasures," the spokesperson said.
The dispute over AI model theft has raised tensions weeks before President Donald Trump is expected to welcome his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to the White House for their second summit this year. AI has emerged as a key area of US-China technology competition, as top Chinese models close the performance gap with US frontier offerings.
American AI firms including OpenAI and Anthropic PBC as well as Trump administration officials have repeatedly accused Chinese companies of stealing from US models through a technique known as distillation.
On Tuesday, the National Security Agency, FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency took those accusations one step further in a joint statement, detailing which US systems were distilled by each of the Chinese companies and for what reasons. The agencies specifically accused DeepSeek, Moonshot, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI Co. of the practice. The companies did not respond to requests for comment.
The Chinese Commerce Ministry described distillation as a "common practice" used by AI developers worldwide to learn from one another. The ministry suggested American AI companies may be distilling from Chinese AI models.