{"slug": "china-willing-to-hold-ai-talks-with-us-despite-row-over-models", "title": "China ‘Willing’ to Hold AI Talks With US Despite Row Over Models", "summary": "China's Commerce Ministry said Wednesday it is willing to hold constructive AI talks with the US while vowing countermeasures if Washington acts against Chinese AI companies over technology-theft accusations. The statement followed a joint Tuesday statement by the NSA, FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency accusing DeepSeek, Moonshot, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI Co. of distilling US models \"at an industrial scale.\" The dispute escalates US-China technology tensions weeks before President Donald Trump is expected to host Xi Jinping at the White House for their second summit this year.", "body_md": "(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.\n\nMost Read from Bloomberg\n\nThe 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.\n\n\"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.\n\n\"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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nAmerican 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.\n\nOn 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.\n\nThe 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.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-willing-to-hold-ai-talks-with-us-despite-row-over-models", "canonical_source": "https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/china-willing-hold-ai-talks-002243350.html", "published_at": "2026-09-10 00:22:43+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-10 02:48:57.415338+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy", "artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["China Commerce Ministry", "DeepSeek", "Moonshot", "Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.", "MiniMax", "StepFun", "Z.AI Co.", "National Security Agency"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-willing-to-hold-ai-talks-with-us-despite-row-over-models", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-willing-to-hold-ai-talks-with-us-despite-row-over-models.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-willing-to-hold-ai-talks-with-us-despite-row-over-models.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/china-willing-to-hold-ai-talks-with-us-despite-row-over-models.jsonld"}}