The charges were made yesterday in a post on X by White House science and technology chief Michael Kratsios, who also warned that Washington would “be taking action to protect American innovation”.

Asked about the matter at a regular news conference in Beijing on Friday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said: “The US claims are entirely baseless”.

“They are a slanderous smear against the achievements of China’s AI industry. China firmly opposes this,” he said.

“We urge the US side to respect the facts, abandon prejudice, cease technological containment and suppression of China and do more to facilitate technological exchange and cooperation between the two countries,” Guo added.

The rebuttal comes hours after Chinese startup DeepSeek released a new and long-awaited AI model, more than a year after it stunned the world with a low-cost reasoning model that matched the capabilities of US rivals.

The post by Kratsios accused “foreign entities, primarily in China” of “distillation”, a common practice within AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models.