OpenAI, Anthropic, Google unite against AI piracy in China

OpenAI has confirmed its involvement in the information-sharing effort on adversarial distillation through the Frontier Model Forum. The company recently sent a memo to Congress accusing Chinese firm DeepSeek of trying to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.

Distillation is a process where an older "teacher" AI model trains a newer "student" model to replicate its capabilities. This is often cheaper than building an original model from scratch. While some forms of distillation are accepted and encouraged by AI labs, others have been controversial when used by third parties, especially in adversary nations like China or Russia, to replicate proprietary work without authorization.