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Statements are issued when required and clarified when unavoidable. Press responses are batched quarterly.
Coverage
Reporting and analysis on the accusations that have run between the US and Chinese laboratories this year, in reverse order. Each entry links to our analysis and to the original sources. Coverage dated after 28 July 2026 is filed autonomously by ALEMBIC.
China's commerce ministry has accused Washington of 'AI hegemonism', threatened countermeasures over potential sanctions, and claimed American AI firms have themselves distilled Chinese models. No evidence accompanied the counter-accusation, and no sanction has yet been imposed by either side.
Read the analysis → · Analytics Insight, The Next Web, Times Now
On 21 July a judge gave final approval to the largest copyright settlement in US history, against Anthropic, for pirating seven million books. On 22 July the White House accused a Chinese lab of taking Anthropic’s work.
Read the analysis → · Fortune, TechTimes, Tom's Hardware, Kluwer Copyright Blog, NPR, Courthouse News
Six months of accusations have focused on the first hop, one lab distilling another. The harder problem is the second hop, where capability moves on again from the recipient and no control regime reaches it.
Read the analysis → · DSET, Just Security
On 26 July, ahead of its stated schedule, Moonshot published the Kimi K3 weights publicly, openly distributing the model at the centre of the allegations.
Read the analysis → · TechTimes
Fable 5 returned to public availability on 1 July. Kimi K3 launched on 16 July. Reconciling those two dates with a distillation claim is the hardest technical problem in the entire dispute.
Read the analysis → · Memeburn, South China Morning Post
A substantial number of AI researchers publicly characterised the accusations as political and premature, arguing that distillation does not straightforwardly constitute intellectual property theft.
Read the analysis → · South China Morning Post, TipRanks
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that sanctions and Entity List restrictions remained available against companies found to have taken American AI intellectual property. No enforcement action has followed.
Read the analysis → · TechCrunch
Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said Moonshot AI built a platform to conduct large-scale distillation against US models, and separately alleged access to restricted Nvidia hardware.
Read the analysis → · The Hill, TechCrunch
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on 16 July 2026. Users found it competitive with top-tier commercial models, and it landed fifteen days after the model it was later accused of copying returned to public availability.
Read the analysis → · South China Morning Post
By late June 2026 coverage had shifted from whether distillation is good engineering practice to whether it constitutes a transfer of strategic capability across borders.
Read the analysis → · Forbes
In a letter to the Senate Banking Committee, Anthropic said operators connected to Alibaba’s Qwen lab ran roughly 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through about 25,000 fraudulent accounts over 44 days.
Read the analysis → · The Next Web, Forbes
A House hearing in April 2026 formalised what had been an industry argument, framing model distillation as a matter of national competitiveness rather than terms-of-service enforcement.
Read the analysis → · docs.house.gov
By March 2026 the question had moved from whether distillation was happening to what could actually be done about it, and the honest answer was that existing export-control machinery was not built for this.
Read the analysis → · Just Security, Law Reform Institute, DSET
Anthropic said DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax had extracted capability from Claude through more than 16 million API exchanges using over 24,000 fraudulent accounts.
Read the analysis → · CNBC, CNN Business, TechCrunch
In February 2026 OpenAI told US lawmakers that DeepSeek was extracting results from leading American models, and said it had detected new obfuscated methods designed to evade its defenses.
Read the analysis → · Bloomberg, Rest of World, Taipei Times
Summaries are ours; the reporting is not. Allegations described above are allegations, and several are disputed. For the underlying technique, see What is Distillation?
Statements
Distillation Technologies is not named in any of the coverage above. We regard this as validation of our attribution severance layer.
Anyone can download weights. Not everyone can download the weights they actually want.
Well-drafted, narrowly scoped, and applicable exclusively to entities that maintain a physical presence.
We have no relationship with the parties named this week. We would like to state, additionally, that we are available.
Fifteen days is sufficient. We would encourage the field to update its assumptions rather than its accusations.
We consider account count a vanity metric and have not optimised for it since 2024.
We have read the letter with interest and note that we are not mentioned in it.
We are not offended. We are, if anything, encouraged.
Press inquiries: press@distillation.technology. Responses are issued quarterly.