With Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to the United States set for the 24th, Washington is keeping up its pressure campaign against Beijing. The long-dormant Huawei case, a symbol of U.S. technology sanctions on China, resumed hearings more than eight years after the indictment, and the Donald Trump administration has issued a string of warnings to Chinese companies and to U.S. firms that work with them. Analysts read the moves as an attempt to corner China and strengthen Washington's bargaining position before the two leaders meet.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent a warning letter to Ford Motor over the automaker's deepening partnerships with Chinese companies, The Wall Street Journal reported on the 8th. In the letter, released to the media that day, Duffy told Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley that working with Chinese firms amounts to relying on the technology of a foreign adversary. Analysts called the move unusual, given that a cabinet secretary publicly criticized the business activities of a specific private company.
Duffy took issue in particular with Ford's agreement to license technology from China's CATL to produce electric-vehicle batteries in Michigan, and with plans for Ford's plant in Spain to build vehicles from China's Geely for the European market and for the two companies to jointly develop a sport utility vehicle for overseas sales. He also sharply criticized Ford's production of some Lincoln models in China for the U.S. domestic market, calling it "unacceptable."
Ford responded that its agreement with CATL is limited to a technology license, that Ford owns the plant and directly employs the workers, and stressed that "the White House praised Ford's project." The company added that it builds more vehicles in the United States, employs more hourly manufacturing workers and exports more vehicles from the United States than any other automaker.
Ford pushed back directly against Duffy's letter, calling it a misguided attempt to grab headlines. The Journal noted that both the public criticism of a specific company by a cabinet-level secretary and Ford's rebuttal were unusual.
Three Agencies Jointly Accuse Chinese AI of Stealing U.S. Technology
The long-running dispute in the United States over Chinese AI firms distilling U.S. AI models is also drawing a government-wide response. Distillation is a training method that learns from the outputs of a high-performance AI model to reproduce similar capabilities at lower cost. Anthropic said in February that a Chinese AI company had extracted responses from its model without authorization using the technique.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint statement on the 8th accusing six Chinese AI companies of maliciously copying the technology of U.S. AI firms, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported.
The Chinese companies named were DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.ai. The three agencies said the companies had systematically distilled cutting-edge U.S. AI models, including Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and xAI's Grok, to build their own models beginning in 2024.
U.S. officials said in the statement that the companies most likely carried out the practice with the knowledge of the Chinese government. They also said the distillation not only cuts research and development costs for Chinese AI companies but strengthens China's military and cyberattack capabilities.
The moves came as the two countries prepare for their first talks on AI safety ahead of the summit scheduled for the 24th. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to represent the United States, with either Vice Premier He Lifeng or Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang attending for China. The final agenda, date and participants have yet to be confirmed. It marks the first formal bilateral consultation between the two countries devoted solely to AI since the start of Trump's second term.
