China accuses the US of ‘AI hegemonism’ and threatens countermeasures

https://media.thenextweb.com/2026/06/US-China-AI.avif

China’s commerce ministry accused the United States of “AI hegemonism” on Monday and warned that it would retaliate, an escalation in a quarrel that started with an accusation of copying and has since pulled in chips, sanctions, and a pair of senior White House officials.

The ministry said Washington was threatening Chinese companies with punishment on the basis of allegations alone, and it cast the whole affair as an effort to hold back China’s technology sector rather than a genuine grievance about intellectual property.

The trigger was distillation, the practice of training a weaker model on the outputs of a stronger one.

White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director Michael Kratsios alleged that the Beijing firm Moonshot AI had distilled Anthropic’s Claude to build its Kimi K3 system, and that it had done so at industrial scale through a purpose-built internal platform designed to dodge detection.

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