Beijing accused US artificial intelligence firms Monday of using Chinese examples to train their models, days after Washington threatened sanctions on Chinese firms for allegedly stealing American technology.“It is understood that many American artificial intelligence enterprises have distilled Chinese models during their research, development and training processes,” the Chinese commerce ministry said in a statement.Distillation is a process in which an AI model is trained to mimic the output of a larger, more capable one. The method is used across the industry, but US officials say Chinese firms have deployed it at scale to illicitly copy proprietary American systems.The ministry said some Chinese models were released close to their US counterparts and had achieved leading capabilities in areas including front-end coding. The statement defended the use of distillation as a widely used technique across industries, while alleging that many American AI companies had distilled Chinese models. The Chinese ministry said the US accusations “lack factual basis and legal grounds, adopt double standards in practice, and constitute typical acts of artificial intelligence hegemonism”. “China will take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its interests,” it added.Treasury secretary Scott Bessent last week threatened sanctions against China, amid reports the US is also weighing a ban on foreign-made open source models.