China's AI Shadow: The Sanctions Road Ahead The recent hints from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent about potential US sanctions on China over its alleged theft of American large language models have sent shockwaves through the tech community.
On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that this is more than just another chapter in the ongoing saga of intellectual property disputes between the two nations.
Bessent's comments on Fox Business highlighted a contentious issue: "model distillation. " This involves smaller AI labs mimicking and refining larger models by training on massive datasets.