The U.S. Is Curbing Foreign Access To The Country’s Top AI Models. Now China Is Reportedly Following Suit

The Chinese government is considering reducing foreign access to its top AI models, according to a new report.

Reuters detailed that authorities have held meetings with representatives of the country’s main tech firms about the possibility, which would include models that have not been released yet. Leaks or the theft of proprietary technology would be considered an offense under the country’s national security law, a source told the outlet.

Some of the companies that took part in the talks are Alibaba and ByteDance. Reuters noted that Chinese AI models have made strides in global adoption largely due to their lower costs and increasing capabilities. The curbing of access for companies overseas would drive up costs for many already relying on the technology.

The U.S. government has taken similar measures, most recently imposing restrictions on Fable 5, Anthropic’s new powerful AI model that drew scrutiny over its powerful capabilities.

The decision lasted 18 days, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick saying that the Trump administration and the company worked to “analyze and approve Fable 5 to ensure alignment across the US Government and strengthen America’s leadership in AI.”

Elsewhere, leading U.S. AI companies are quietly deploying increasingly aggressive measures to prevent Chinese rivals from using their technology to accelerate their own development.

Anthropic recently admitted that it briefly embedded software inside its Claude Code programming assistant that silently checked whether users’ computers were configured with Chinese time zones or connected to internet domains associated with Chinese AI firms.

The monitoring tool was removed after software developers discovered it and privacy advocates criticized the company for effectively surveilling its own users. Anthropic described the feature as an experimental security measure that has since been rolled back in favor of other protections.

Companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI argue that Chinese firms are using a technique known as “distillation” to rapidly improve their own AI systems by learning from the responses generated by more advanced American models.

Distillation is a common AI training method that involves using a larger model as a teacher for a smaller one. While the process itself is legal and widely used across the industry, Anthropic and OpenAI argue that unauthorized large-scale use of their commercial systems violates their terms of service and amounts to intellectual property theft.

Anthropic has repeatedly claimed that Chinese AI companies have launched sophisticated campaigns involving thousands of fraudulent accounts to extract millions of responses from Claude. In a recent letter to U.S. senators, the company alleged that Alibaba’s Qwen AI team used roughly 25,000 fake accounts to generate more than 28.8 million interactions with Claude in an effort to improve its own technology.

The company previously made similar accusations against Chinese AI developers DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax, arguing that such efforts have grown in both scale and sophistication. OpenAI has also warned U.S. lawmakers that Chinese competitors are attempting to replicate American AI systems through similar methods.