China rejected US allegations that China-based AI companies systematically extracted proprietary capabilities from American artificial-intelligence models, urging Washington to stop what Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning called false allegations. Mao said China’s AI progress comes from greater self-reliance and advances in science and technology, alongside a commitment to consultation, shared contribution and open cooperation. She said AI development should remain open and inclusive and serve humanity, and urged the US to implement the important common understandings reached between the two presidents. The dispute followed a Tuesday statement from the US Cyber Defense Agency, which accused DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of using knowledge distillation (training one AI model from another model’s outputs) to obtain billions of tokens through millions of exchanges with US frontier models, including Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok, since at least late 2024. The agency said the activity was likely conducted with Chinese government awareness and represented a core development strategy rather than a supplementary practice.