Two parallel moves in 24 hours mark a significant escalation of the US-China AI war from chips and exports into capital and models. 

China plans to restrict its leading technology companies, including top AI startups, from accepting US capital without first obtaining government approval, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

No Chinese government official confirmed the report. The move, if implemented, would represent a significant structural shift in how Chinese AI companies access foreign capital, effectively placing US venture capital into the same approval framework that already governs certain technology exports, data flows, and foreign acquisitions of Chinese assets.
The timing is not accidental.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced it would crack down on foreign technology companies, singling out China, that are “exploiting” US artificial intelligence models, a practice known as model distillation.

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White House Director of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios framed the move as the first major US government response to complaints from Silicon Valley AI companies that Chinese developers have been using open-source or commercially accessible US AI models as training data to build rival-generation systems, thereby closing the capability gap without having to develop from scratch.

Bloomberg characterised the US move as targeting Chinese firms “improperly” using American AI models.

Together, the two announcements describe a 24-hour escalation in which both governments moved simultaneously to sever the remaining channels of AI technology and capital transfer.

The US is trying to prevent its models from being used to train Chinese competitors; China is trying to prevent American money, which carries intangible benefits including managerial expertise, talent networks, and strategic access, from flowing into its AI national champions without state oversight.

Each move is a response to the other’s prior actions, and each creates the conditions for the next retaliation.

The backdrop to China’s reported capital controls is the existing US outbound investment rule that came into effect on 2 January 2025, which prohibits US persons from making equity investments in Chinese companies engaged in advanced semiconductors, quantum computing, or certain AI systems without Treasury Department approval or notification.

China’s reported plan is, in structural terms, the inbound mirror of that US rule: requiring government approval before Chinese AI companies accept capital from the country that has also been restricting chip exports to China since 2022.

The model distillation question is the more technically novel of the two moves. Chinese developers have used DeepSeek-R1, Meta’s open-source Llama models, and other accessible US models as training signal for their own systems, a practice that is currently legal under open-source licences but which US AI companies argue gives Chinese labs an unfair structural advantage.

DeepSeek V4-Pro, released earlier today and covered separately by TNW, was trained with Huawei chips and claimed near-frontier performance; whether it also incorporated distillation from US models is a question the administration’s new framework would directly address.

The enforcement mechanism for the distillation crackdown has not been specified publicly; the question of how a government would prevent training data from crossing borders is technically and legally unsettled.

The commercial implications for Chinese AI startups are significant but uncertain. Companies like Moonshot AI, Zhipu AI, MiniMax, and the entity formerly known as Manus AI have been navigating a capital environment that was already constrained by US regulatory signals.

If the approval requirement is implemented, it would add a formal layer of Chinese government oversight to any US VC investment in those companies, potentially chilling investment further or driving more of China’s AI capital formation through domestic channels.

The Chinese government has been increasing state investment in AI infrastructure and has made no secret of its preference for domestic AI champions over internationally capitalised ones. A formal approval regime for US investment would be consistent with that preference.

What neither measure resolves is the underlying dynamic driving it: China’s AI capabilities are improving faster than the export controls are degrading them. DeepSeek V4, released today, claims near-frontier performance on coding and mathematics using Huawei chips, not Nvidia ones.

The US controls on chip exports and investment were premised on a widening capability gap; that gap is narrowing. The question both governments are now answering is not “how do we maintain the current technological order” but “how do we shape the terms of a competition that is already fully joined.”