U.S. Proposes AI Bill to Restrain Chinese Model Distillation

ME News report, July 24 (UTC+8): According to monitoring by Beating, U.S. bipartisan lawmakers have introduced the CATS Act. The bill proposes to grant AI companies limited antitrust exemptions, allowing competitors to share intelligence on model theft, distillation, and cyberattacks. In cases of national security risks, they may jointly delay or restrict the deployment of high-risk models. Distillation refers to extensively querying powerful models, collecting their responses, and using this data to train cheaper models. The bill’s sponsors identify China as the primary target. Previously, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have accused Chinese laboratories of大规模 extracting their model capabilities. The U.S. government has recently singled out Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3. Before jointly restricting models, companies must provide written notice to the U.S. Department of Justice and demonstrate that their actions are solely intended to address security risks. Price fixing, market allocation, monopolization, and joint boycotts remain illegal. (Source: BlockBeats)