Trump should crack down on Chinese AI distillation

The Washington Examiner has found the fix for the AI arms race, and it is — drum roll — a column telling Donald Trump to do something. Since at least 2025, the piece reports, Chinese labs have leaned on "distillation" to mirror American frontier models, distillation being the trade's polite word for copying the clever bits and calling it chemistry. "Since at least 2025" is doing lovely work there; nobody can quite date the start of the larceny, only its persistence.

When Moonshot shipped its Kimi K3 model in July, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned the company could be subject to restrictions. Could. Be. Subject. To. Restrictions. Four hedges stacked like kettlebells, delivered in the conditional tense by the man who controls the money. The article labels the campaigns "organized deception," a marvellous phrase — it sounds like a le Carré plot while describing the entirely standard practice of everyone reading everyone else's homework. Having watched Trump and Xi fail to establish any binding framework on frontier AI we flagged that meeting, the ceiling here is a Treasury stern look.

The deeper joke is that distillation only works because American labs keep publishing the recipe, then act shocked when the neighbours cook with it. Kimi K3 arrives, Bessent murmurs about restrictions, and the frontier advantage is quietly revealed as a subscription service with generous trial access. The crackdown, when it comes, will presumably land the same week as the next frontier model, and cost roughly what the memo it's printed on cost. Meanwhile the actual proposal is for the President to act, in a magazine whose masthead promises "Courage, Strength, Optimism" — two of three of which are not policy instruments. Somewhere a Chinese lab is distilling this column too, and honestly getting the best of it.