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So let me get this straight--we will seek to benefit a couple of large proprietary US AI labs at the expense of undermining the competitive posture of every single US company seeking to use reasonably priced, perfectly capable open models? Completely self-defeating AI strategy.
Bessent says U.S. could sanction China over AI model 'theft' https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/21/bessent-china-ai-sanctions.html?taid=6a5f757409ccf10001f1a26c&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_content=main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
Bessent lays out the playbook: 1. Declare distillation to be theft. 2. Find that every foreign model has distilled a US model. 3. Sanction those companies and make it harder to use their models. This is a playbook for giving people outside the US, including malicious actors, more powerful AI capabilities than Americans. It does nothing to reduce the capabilities of a cyber attacker or terrorist outside of the US. It does attempt to make life harder for American defenders.
Treasury Sec. Bessent on Fox: “This administration supports open source models, but what we do not support is IP theft. If we see, especially, that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft.”