American AI companies say Chinese copycats are quickly catching up

The American companies building artificial intelligence systems are loudly complaining that their Chinese competitors are unfairly copying their technology, and they are pleading with officials to do something about it.

On June 10, Anthropic sent a letter to Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, accusing the Chinese tech giant Alibaba of surreptitiously copying its AI technologies using a technique called distillation. Like other Chinese companies, Alibaba tapped into Anthropic’s technologies through tens of thousands of unauthorized accounts, according to the letter, which was viewed by The New York Times. Then it used the data it collected to train its own AI systems.

Anthropic asked the lawmakers, who lead a Senate committee that was about to hold a hearing on AI, to explore ways of curbing China’s distillation.

Read more at New York Times