Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that distilling AI models — models trained on the results of other models — is “competition,” although the White House has called it theft.
Distillation has become a flashpoint in tensions between the United States and China in their race for AI supremacy. US officials have accused Chinese AI companies of distillation.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called it “theft” in July and threatened sanctions against foreign companies that use it to extract capabilities from U.S.-built models.
But when asked if distilling was “not theft,” Huang told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday: “It’s called competition.”
“You’re allowed to test someone else’s products as much as you want,” he said, adding that Nvidia’s products were sometimes “stripped bare” as companies tried to learn how they worked.
“I would really prefer if they didn’t do it,” he said. “I would really prefer that no one learn from our products, and that we have the advantage of just browsing. But, you know, frankly, competition makes everything better.”
“If you don’t like it, if you don’t like people using your products, all you have to do is know your customers and turn off the service,” Huang said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
Earlier this month, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency accused Chinese AI companies of conducting “industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns” that violated the US companies’ terms of service.
Anthropic said earlier this month that it had found Alibaba, which develops the Qwen family of models, and DeepSeek, both engaged in “illicit distillation.”
China has rejected the allegations.
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