Jensen Huang calls model distillation competition, breaking with the White House line
Nvidia's CEO sides with the market in the distillation dispute, exposing a split between industry and US regulators.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says model distillation is market competition, not theft.
Speaking on CNBC's Squawk Box on Monday, he was asked whether distillation amounts to "raiding" and replied: "That's called competition." Companies are free to test each other's products, he said, adding that some have taken Nvidia hardware apart almost to the skeleton to understand how it works — and if a vendor dislikes that, it can simply shut off the service.
The other side of the dispute is the US government: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called distillation "theft" in July and threatened sanctions against overseas firms that pull capabilities from American models. Earlier this month, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency accused Chinese AI companies of running "industrial-scale knowledge distillation." Anthropic also said it found "illegal distillation" by Alibaba and DeepSeek; China has rejected these accusations.