New Delhi, May 4 -- AMERICA'S TOP artificial-intelligence labs have accused their Chinese rivals of being ruthless copycats. This month Anthropic and OpenAI each disclosed evidence that leading Chinese AI labs have illicitly used American models to train their own. The firms accuse Chinese researchers of aggressively "distilling" American chatbots-feeding them prompts in order to learn from and mimic their responses. "China is, in effect, stealing the weights of our best AI models," says Chris McGuire of the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank. "These are among the most valuable assets on earth."

Such claims are not new. OpenAI accused DeepSeek of similar behaviour early last year, after the Chinese lab shocked Silicon V...