The U.S. wants to contain China’s AI. Silicon Valley keeps using it
Rest of World Paul Triolo ● Covered by 16 sources
Anthropic warned that Chinese AI developers are distilling capabilities from American frontier models, but hours later Thinking Machines revealed its new foundation model incorporated Chinese models DeepSeek-V3 and Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.5, exposing the contradiction in U.S. containment efforts. Major AI laboratories worldwide including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Chinese firms all routinely use teacher-student model training and synthetic data generation, meaning the competitive question is now whose models become teachers rather than whether distillation occurs at all. As Chinese frontier models like Qwen and Ernie become embedded in global infrastructure—including Apple's China-specific AI stack using Alibaba and Baidu models—the U.S. faces a policy paradox: tightening controls on its own closed models while confronting openly distributed Chinese alternatives that remain beyond regulatory reach.
Why it matters
As Apple, Thinking Machines, and developers worldwide embrace Chinese AI models such as Kimi K3, U.S. policymakers are struggling to protect the AI lead.
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