Bessent says US needs more open-source AI models to compete with China

Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, went to Congress to explain that the United States needs to foster open AI models in order to compete with China — an interesting brief for the man whose department is nominally in charge of the money that would do the fostering. His evidence: Chinese labs have trained open-source models on American companies' closed-source ones, a process known as distillation. His verdict: 'a polite, scientific word for steal.' The Treasury Secretary, in a room full of lawmakers, has delivered the most quotable sentence of the year on intellectual property. Wonderful.

The awkwardness is that America's frontier labs have spent years ingesting every book, article, song and forum post they could get a crawler onto, and the industry term for that is 'training data', not theft. Distillation is stealing; scraping is R&D. The report does not say what Bessent proposes to do about any of it — no bill, no funding figure, no mechanism, no named target. Just a Treasury Secretary, a phrase, and the fond hope that somebody else converts it into policy before anyone has to test whether 'foster' means anything.

And the remedy, per the report, is for the United States to foster more open models — which is one way to answer an alleged heist of American intellectual property: give away more American intellectual property, faster, to everyone, including whoever was allegedly doing the taking. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey made the case for strong federal AI oversight not resting with technology companies alone; the federal government's contribution to that conversation is now a Treasury Secretary praising open weights because Beijing has open weights. Nobody in the excerpt mentions safety, liability, or what happens when a distilled copy of an American model is pointed at something the original was trained to refuse. The strategy is 'more', the evidence is 'they started it', and the enforcement is a polite word for steal.