Despite the hype surrounding China’s artificial intelligence capabilities, progress remains heavily dependent on theft and smuggling. The Chinese Communist party (CCP), meanwhile, is determined to maintain tight control. That has become increasingly clear ahead of this week’s Beijing summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. The Chinese leader is determined to lead the world in what he terms an ‘epoch-defining technology’. He appears confident that Trump, preoccupied by his war against Iran, has limited options to counter Beijing’s increasingly brazen activities.

Last month, the White House accused Beijing of ‘industrial-scale’ theft of know-how from American AI labs. Meanwhile, US prosecutors claim to have busted an international smuggling ring that funnelled advanced chips worth billions of dollars to China in defiance of sanctions. The CCP is also stepping up efforts to protect China’s own AI innovation, blocking a $2 billion (£1.5 billion) takeover by Meta of a Chinese AI start-up called Manus. For good measure, the authorities prevented Manus’s two founders from leaving the country.

The accusations of theft refer to a process called ‘distillation’, whereby China is accused of illicitly training its smaller AI models on the output of larger (and expensively developed) US models. A leaked internal memo written by Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said:

The US government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems.

The US government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems.

Distillation involves the creation of thousands of fake accounts for the targeted AI chatbot or tool, with the accounts working together to extract information. The US AI company Anthropic said it had detected 24,000 fraudulent accounts, which had generated more than 16 million exchanges with its powerful Claude chatbot. It accused leading Chinese labs of being behind the campaign in order to acquire powerful capabilities ‘in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost’. The company also warned that ‘distilled’ apps would carry none of the safeguards of the original against using AI for such........

© The Spectator