People’s Daily piece pushing back on the NSA report on AI distillation. What’s interesting to me is that Beijing never denies doing distillation and instead argues it’s a common industry practice. Headline: “Politicizing technology issues, an old tactic of US hegemony” “AI is a new frontier of human development. It is not the preserve of major powers, still less should it be reduced to an arena for zero-sum competition. Recently, the U.S. National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Federal Bureau of Investigation jointly issued an advisory accusing Chinese artificial intelligence companies of conducting “industrial-scale” distillation against the United States to obtain the capabilities of U.S. frontier models, while recommending related defensive measures to U.S. companies. The U.S. accusation is unsupported by facts and lacks any legal basis. In essence, it politicizes and instrumentalizes distillation—a normal technical and commercial practice in the industry—and applies a double standard in practice. This once again exposes the United States’ longstanding approach of pursuing technological hegemony in artificial intelligence, monopolizing computing power, and suppressing competition. China firmly opposes this. Distillation is a common practice through which models in the artificial intelligence field learn from one another. It is, in essence, a neutral technical method used by model developers around the world, including U.S. companies. By using a high-performing “teacher model” to guide a lighter-weight “student model,” distillation can improve the efficiency of model training and enable more efficient use of human knowledge. It has positive significance for countries seeking to develop their artificial intelligence industries, unlock the potential of the technology, narrow development gaps, and extend its benefits more broadly to developing countries and the general public. China encourages open source development, openness, cooperation, and sharing. It has made open-source models available to companies around the world, including U.S. firms, facilitating the development of related models. Reports on model development by U.S. companies have also disclosed that they make extensive use of distillation from Chinese models. By the United States’ logic, when U.S. companies use distillation it is a “standard industry practice,” but when Chinese companies use it, it becomes an “attack.” This is a blatant double standard. By elevating a standard industry practice into a national security issue, the United States is using opposition to distillation as a pretext for pursuing industrial monopoly. For a long time, certain U.S. artificial intelligence companies have abused their dominant competitive positions by inserting sweeping geographic restrictions and other overbearing provisions into their terms of service, in an attempt to exclude competitors from countries such as China from the global technology ecosystem and monopolize the benefits of artificial intelligence development. This time, U.S. security agencies themselves issued the advisory, tying the interests of particular companies and capital to national security and using the coercive power of the state to interfere in normal commercial activity. This undoubtedly amounts to official endorsement of such overbearing provisions. For some time, U.S. executive and legislative authorities have repeatedly threatened sanctions and other forms of suppression against Chinese companies, with restrictions expanding step by step from controls on chips and blockades on computing power to areas such as access to models. The United States has not hesitated to wield state power to preserve its technological hegemony and monopoly over computing power. At root, this reflects deep anxiety over the prospect of losing its technological dominance. The logic it continues to follow is one in which “only America is allowed to win…”