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China has dismissed accusations from the United States that Chinese entities are involved in large-scale efforts to steal American artificial intelligence technology, describing the allegations as baseless.
The claims were made on Thursday by White House science and technology chief Michael Kratsios in a post on X (formerly Twitter), in which he said Washington would take steps to protect US innovation.
Responding during a regular briefing in Beijing on Friday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said the allegations had no basis and amounted to an attempt to discredit China’s achievements in artificial intelligence.
The U.S. has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI. We will be taking action to protect American innovation.
These foreign entities are using tens of thousands of proxies and jailbreaking… pic.twitter.com/kSp1FReI7J
— Director Michael Kratsios (@mkratsios47) April 23, 2026
He said China strongly opposed the claims and urged the United States to respect facts, abandon prejudice, stop suppressing Chinese technology development, and instead promote technological exchanges and cooperation between both countries.
“The US claims are entirely baseless.
“They are a slanderous smear against the achievements of China’s artificial intelligence industry. China firmly opposes this.
“We urge the US side to respect the facts, abandon prejudice, cease technological containment and suppression of China and do more to facilitate technological exchange and cooperation between the two countries,” he said.
The exchange came shortly after Chinese startup DeepSeek launched a new AI model, more than a year after drawing global attention with a lower-cost reasoning system said to rival products developed in the United States.
Kratsios had accused foreign actors, particularly those in China, of using “distillation,” a common AI development technique often employed to build smaller and cheaper versions of existing models.
