Nvidia's Huang Calls AI Model Distillation 'Competition,' Contradicting Treasury's Bessent

Jensen Huang told CNBC's Squawk Box that AI model distillation — training on the outputs of another model — is 'competition' and that 'you're allowed to test somebody else's products all you want.' Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had called the practice 'theft' in July and threatened sanctions against overseas companies. The public split lands as CISA, Anthropic and BIS have all accused DeepSeek, Alibaba and other Chinese labs of running 'industrial-scale' distillation on US frontier models.