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【Jensen Huang:AI Model distillation is competition, not theft】
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview with CNBC《Squawk Box》 that training or learning with a competitor's product constitutes competition, rejecting the characterization of AI model distillation as theft. Asked whether distillation was not tantamount to robbery, Huang said that this is competition. He said people can test others' products, and NVIDIA products are sometimes reverse-engineered down to the bare bones to understand how they work; he would prefer that others not learn from NVIDIA products, but competition makes everything better. If one does not want others to use one's products, one can identify customers and deactivate the service. U.S. officials accuse Chinese AI companies of using distillation—training models on the outputs of other models—to extract capabilities from U.S. systems. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent July called the practice theft and threatened sanctions against overseas companies that use distillation to extract capabilities from U.S. models. The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment, and U.S. officials are considering measures against overseas companies that use distillation. Earlier this month, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency accused Chinese AI companies of conducting industrial-scale knowledge-distillation activities in violation of the terms of use of U.S. companies' services.AI company Anthropic said earlier the same month that it had found Alibaba's Qwen series models and DeepSeek both engaging in illicit distillation. China denied the allegations.