Jensen Huang calls AI distillation 'competition,' Bessent calls it 'theft'

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC that training models on competitors' outputs is "competition," not theft. U.S. officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and CISA, accuse Chinese AI firms of industrial-scale distillation and weigh sanctions.

• Huang: learning from others' products is "called competition"
• Bessent in July called distillation "theft," threatened sanctions
• CISA accused Chinese AI firms of industrial-scale distillation
• Anthropic said Alibaba and DeepSeek engaged in illicit distillation