Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the distillation of AI models, where models are trained on the output of other models, is “competition” despite the White House calling it theft.
Distillation has become a key flashpoint in tensions between the US and China over AI supremacy. U.S. officials have accused Chinese AI companies of distilling.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in July described it as “theft” and threatened sanctions against foreign companies that use it to extract functionality from American-made models.
But when asked if distilling is “not robbery,” Huang told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday, “It’s called competition.”
“We’re allowed to test other people’s products as much as we want,” he said, adding that Nvidia’s products are sometimes stripped “to the bone” as companies try to learn how they work.
“I really wish I hadn’t done that,” he said. “We really hope that no one learns from our product. We have the advantage of just moving on. But frankly, competition makes everything better.”
“If you don’t like that, if you don’t want others to use your product, just know your customers and disable the service,” Huang said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency accused Chinese AI companies of conducting an “industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaign” that violates U.S. companies’ terms of service.
Earlier this month, Anthropic announced that it had discovered that Alibaba and DeepSeek, which develop the Qwen family of models, were both involved in “illegal distillation.”
China rejected this claim.
