Chinese military reportedly uses American AI models to train its defense systems - tools from OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly among those affected

The letters AI in a box in the middle of a vast digital room divided by beams of line.

• Distillation sidesteps the logic of US export controls, which restrict the chips needed to train frontier models but cannot restrict the text those models produce
• Review of more than 80 Chinese papers and patents found PLA-linked researchers distilling outputs from OpenAI and Anthropic models into small systems they can run locally
• The Trump administration is increasingly critical of the approach and has claimed Chinese research lab-created Kimi K3 distilled Anthropic's Fable model

A new investigation has claimed Chinese military researchers have used outputs from American AI models built by OpenAI and Anthropic to train domestic systems intended to advance the country's defense capabilities.