Leading Democrat asks AI firms for data on any Chinese access to sensitive code

A Democratic lawmaker is warning that Beijing could steal AI model weights developed by OpenAI, Anthropic and other top US firms, erasing the US edge over China in the AI race and posing a risk to US national security.

OpenAI and Anthropic have reported multiple instances of Chinese AI firms like Moonshot or DeepSeek “distilling” their AI models, or training their own tools from the output of leading Western models. But there are few known cases of any bad actor stealing model weights, the exact parameters and code that make an AI model operate.