US hardens AI stance on China as Anthropic calls for extending lead

Washington is moving to strengthen its artificial intelligence posture towards China, with lawmakers advancing new export control bills and the Trump administration deepening cooperation with leading US AI firms as concerns grow that Beijing is rapidly closing the technological gap.

A senior Anthropic executive said on Wednesday that the United States holds a six-to-nine-month lead in frontier AI models over Chinese competitors, while accusing Chinese companies of using unauthorised “distillation” techniques to replicate American advances.

“We actually do have a pretty good handle on the lead. I think the six-to-nine-month figure is kind of an average if you look at models,” Tarun Chhabra, Anthropic’s head of national security policy, said during a discussion at the Aspen Security Forum.

Chhabra characterised what he described as China’s use of model distillation as “adversarial”, describing it as “extracting the most valuable IP from the models”. He added that the United States could have been “a year to 18 months ahead” if Chinese firms had not engaged in the practice.

“Virtually all of China’s leading labs now are distilling not only our models but those of our peers in the United States as well,” he said. “We are now shutting down accounts that are facilitating this distillation on the order of millions of accounts per week.”