Nvidia CEO Defends AI Distillation Against US Theft Claims

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang characterized AI model distillation—the process of training models on the outputs of other models—as competition, contradicting the White House's view of the practice as theft. The disagreement follows accusations from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the AI company Anthropic that Chinese firms, including Alibaba and DeepSeek, have conducted industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns to extract capabilities from U.S.-built models.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent previously described the practice as theft and threatened sanctions against overseas companies utilizing distillation. While Huang expressed a preference that others not learn from Nvidia's products, he argued that competition improves the industry. He suggested that companies who dislike the practice should know their customers and disable their services for specific users.

China has rejected the U.S. allegations of illicit distillation. Huang maintained that testing other products is permitted and that competition makes the overall industry better.