Top White House advisers this week expressed alarm that China's DeepSeek may have benefited from a method that allegedly piggybacks off the advances of US rivals called "distillation."

For the second time in the last month, a Chinese app has skyrocketed to the top spot in Apple’s App Store. The first was Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, which saw a sudden surge in downloads by United States users seeking an alternative to TikTok in anticipation of the ban on that app,

The start-up had become a key player in the “Chinese Large-Model Technology Avengers Team” that would counter US AI dominance, said another. China’s delight, however, spelled pain for several giant US technology companies as investors questioned whether DeepSeek’s breakthrough undermined the case for their colossal spending on AI infrastructure.

Deepseek collects similar data to American-based AI models, but Chinese laws could make that data more accessible to the government.

The U.S. tried to slow China’s advances, but the startup showed how hard that is.