According to CNBC, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said Chinese AI models are "world class" and that the lead held by top U.S. labs is "evaporating very quickly." Gomez said some distillation is taking place, but argued it does not explain all of China’s progress and that the latest Chinese models have, on some benchmarks and capabilities, outperformed the best American models. He also said Western policymakers may be underestimating China’s technical capabilities, while Anthropic and U.S. officials have accused Chinese labs of using distillation to train models. Anthropic’s head of threat intelligence, Jacob Klein, said there is "an entire illicit ecosystem" aimed at gaining access to Claude and other models, and the company said Alibaba, Moonshot and DeepSeek attempted "illicit distillation."