US threatens sanctions against Chinese AI models over IP theft
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the U.S. is investigating Chinese open-source AI models for potential intellectual property theft. The administration is considering sanctions against Chinese companies if evidence of unauthorized model distillation is confirmed.
Why it matters
This marks a significant escalation in the U.S.-China technological rivalry, potentially disrupting the global open-source AI ecosystem and impacting major AI developers.
On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. would examine open source models from China for signs of intellectual property theft, threatening sanctions against Chinese AI companies if IP theft is established.
“We’ve seen a lot of talk about open source models coming and threatening the large language models in the US,” Bessent said on Fox Business Tuesday. “This administration supports open source models, but what we do not support is IP theft. If we see, especially, that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft.”
Bessent’s comments were first reported by Bloomberg .
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