By Eduardo BaptistaBEIJING, July 31 (Reuters) - Chinese military researchers have used outputs from leading U.S. artificial intelligence models developed by OpenAI and Anthropic to train domestic AI systems to advance China's defence capabilities, according to a Reuters review of more than 80 Chinese academic papers and patents. The papers suggest Chinese defence institutions see leading U.S. AI models as both a source of technical insight and a way to close the gap with American rivals. U.S. officials have accused some Chinese entities of using distillation to extract capabilities from American AI models, potentially undermining export controls and infringing intellectual property rights. As Chinese AI models close the gap with their U.S. counterparts, military researchers are also examining distillation as a potential security risk. Trevor Koverko, co-founder of AI data company Sapien, said distilled models remain less capable than their teacher models.