Anthropic says China’s AI tigers are copycats

America’s top artificial intelligence labs have

accused their Chinese rivals of being ruthless copycats

. In February, Anthropic and OpenAI each disclosed evidence that leading Chinese AI labs have illicitly used American models to train their own.

The firms accuse Chinese researchers of aggressively “distilling” American chatbots – feeding them prompts to learn from and mimic their responses. “China is, in effect, stealing the weights of our best AI models,” says Mr Chris McGuire of the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank. “These are among the most valuable assets on earth.”