In the deepening contest over artificial intelligence supremacy, US federal agencies have accused major Chinese firms — including Alibaba and DeepSeek — of systematically extracting the intellectual core of American AI models through a technique called distillation, framing the conduct not as opportunistic mimicry but as an organized, industrial-scale campaign of trade secret theft. The accusation arrives at a moment when both nations have staked their technological futures on AI dominance, and when the tools for replicating a rival's work have outpaced the legal frameworks designed to prevent