The rapid rise of Chinese artificial intelligence has sparked an unusual divide inside Silicon Valley, pitting some of the world’s biggest AI developers against one another over how the United States should respond. A string of increasingly capable Chinese models, including DeepSeek, Z.ai’s GLM 5.2 and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, has challenged the assumption that American companies held an unassailable lead. Anthropic has emerged as one of the strongest advocates for tighter controls, alleging "industrial-scale campaigns by three AI laboratories—DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax—to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models." Anthropic said those organisations generated more than 16 million interactions with Claude using approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts. The allegations have not been independently verified. Anthropic wants the US government to classify frontier AI model weights as strategic national assets and impose stricter controls on API access. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently said officials were considering sanctions against Chinese companies accused of stealing American AI intellectual property, adding that “open source is not open season on American IP.” White House science adviser Michael Kratsios has also criticised what he described as “large-scale, covert industrial distillation” of American AI technology.