Why the U.S. Must Simultaneously Compete—and Cooperate—With China on AI

We also need to tighten remaining gaps in our semiconductor manufacturing equipment controls so China can less capably obtain tools to manufacture powerful chips at scale and service their pre-existing equipment. That work has to happen with our Dutch, Japanese, and German allies and partners who manufacture and service this chipmaking equipment. 

Finally, the U.S. government should put a greater burden on the AI companies to take adversarial distillation much more seriously. Distillation—coordinated, industrial-scale efforts by AI labs to train their weaker models on the outputs of frontier models—has become a significant issue in the past year. Anthropic has attributed more than 16 million Claude exchanges to distillation campaigns, and has estimated that over 3 million of these distillation campaigns can be traced back to China’s Moonshot AI  (the company behind China’s version of ChatGPT, Kimi) along with other Chinese AI labs like Alibaba and DeepSeek. Moonshot, for instance, was later caught forwarding user prompts to Claude to answer and feeding those answers back through Kimi.