China Condemns US Ban on DeepSeek AI

China has opposed US policy on artificial intelligence (AI), condemning the US government’s order for its agencies to stop using AI developed by DeepSeek.

Xinhua reported on Wednesday (21 October 2026) that China believes the US has excessively expanded the concept of national security and politicised issues involving science, technology, the economy and trade.

“We will resolutely protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said.

China and the US have been engaged in a fierce trade war and are also competing intensely in AI.

China’s position in AI has changed rapidly. According to DW, the country has gone from being five years behind the US in advanced AI to trailing by only a few months.

While US developers such as Anthropic, with Claude, and OpenAI, with ChatGPT, have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to advance AI, China has taken a different path. Chinese technology companies have prioritised dozens of open-source AI models built on relatively strong underlying technology.

These platforms, including DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen and Xiaomi’s MiMo, are now widely used across businesses, government services and a range of consumer devices in China. In the latest sign that the gap is narrowing, Chinese start-up Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3 last week, a model said to be capable of competing with one of Anthropic’s most advanced AI models, Claude Fable 5, as a first benchmark.

China’s recent progress has prompted a strong reaction in Washington. In July, US President Donald Trump threatened to block US access to Chinese AI models. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also warned that the US could impose sanctions on Chinese models over alleged intellectual property (IP) theft.

Anthropic and OpenAI have accused Chinese laboratories of using US AI models to train their own systems, a process known as knowledge distillation or knowledge transfer.