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Trump’s commerce secretary pick vows to keep China from using US tech to ‘compete with us’
Former long-time Wall Street CEO also pledges ‘across-the-board tariffs’ to gain leverage against Beijing and other countries
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Robert Delaneyin Washington
Donald Trump’s commerce secretary nominee on Wednesday said he aims to prevent China from using American technology, including semiconductor chips by Nvidia, to “compete with us” and vowed “across-the-board tariffs” to gain leverage against Beijing and other countries.
Speaking at his confirmation hearing before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and addressing Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek’s strong showing, Howard Lutnick said he did “not believe DeepSeek was done all above board”.
“That’s nonsense. They stole things. They broke in. They’ve taken our IP and it’s got to end,” he told lawmakers, many of whom pushed him to explain how he would ensure US AI companies could keep a lead in an industry rattled by DeepSeek’s sudden success.
Vowing that “reciprocity” would guide his approach to commerce with China, Lutnick suggested a need for more restrictions on chip exports to China, open source AI models such as Meta’s Llama and the hosting of American-made AI models on any Chinese servers.
“Open platforms, Meta’s open platform, let DeepSeek rely on it,” he added. “Nvidia’s chips, which they bought tons of … drive their DeepSeek model. It’s got to end. If they are going to compete with us, let them compete, but stop using our tools to compete with us.”
OpenAI, the US developer of the ChatGPT chatbot, on Wednesday said it was “reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled” its models. Distillation is the transfer of knowledge from a large-language AI model to a smaller version.
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