Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez challenged the US government's narrative regarding Chinese AI development. In a CNBC interview on September 10, Gomez argued that China's progress is driven by genuine innovation rather than the mere theft of American technology through model distillation.
On September 8, the NSA, CISA, and FBI issued a joint advisory accusing six Chinese firms of using distillation to train smaller models on data from powerful US systems. The agencies reported that approximately 28.8 million exchanges occurred via 25 000 fraudulent Claude accounts during a six-week period in June 2026.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected these claims on September 9, attributing their AI advancements to domestic investment. Gomez noted that Chinese GLM models currently process roughly 10 trillion tokens daily using domestically produced silicon, bypassing US export controls.
Gomez, a co-author of the original transformer paper, emphasized that Chinese models now outperform US counterparts on various benchmarks. He suggests this performance level would be impossible if the systems were only distilled copies of existing American technology.
