September 08, 2026

How China Is Stealing America’s AI

By: Liza Tobin

This article was originally published in The Free Press.

American companies will spend roughly $700 billion this year on the physical build-out of artificial intelligence: data centers, chips, and computing power. Every dollar is a bet on American capitalism—that the advances those facilities help produce will earn enough to fund the next breakthrough.

The advent of Chinese open-weight models is undermining that bet, not just by ordinary competition, but by theft. (Open-weight means its code is freely downloadable and customizable, unlike its proprietary U.S. rivals.) Chinese AI models like DeepSeek, Moonshot’s Kimi K3, and Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen barely registered in American C-suites before last year. They now run inside Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash, and many others.

Sometimes the fingerprints are obvious: Kimi K3 has identified itself as “Claude,” Anthropic’s model; it was trained on so much of its rival’s output that it mistakes itself for the original.

China’s prowess is attributable in part to real ingenuity. It also owes much to a technique called distillation, in which a state-of-the-art American model is asked millions of questions, its answers are recorded, and a new model is trained on them—inheriting much of the original’s capability without needing anything like the research and investment that produced it. Done with permission, it’s an acceptable research practice. Apple pays Google to distill the latter’s Gemini model and make a smarter Siri. University labs use the technique to study how models work.

Read the full article in The Free Press.

More from CNAS

View All Reports View All Articles & Multimedia