As the global race to create the most advanced artificial intelligence continues to heat up, the list of concerns about AI’s impact – from the wiping out of jobs to its potential to make planet-altering decisions without human intervention – grows long. Nations are rushing to decide which values to impose on what could be the 21st century’s greatest mold-breaking technology. 

First, AI’s creators themselves must decide whether to abide by one key value: honesty. 

Or rather, the potency of honesty to bring creativity and, yes, the highest intelligence, to AI. 

For too many AI firms, building a frontier model by imitating a rival’s training data, explanations, and reasoning has been the norm. This style of theft, known as distillation, is often driven by impatience, fear of competitive failure, or doubts about one’s own ingenuity. 

Yet, last month, Zhang Yiming, founder of one of China’s best-known tech companies, ByteDance, reportedly told his AI team to avoid distillation from American AI models. With many of his workers eager to lift the proprietary work of other AI firms, he called for patience and long-term independent research, “rather than using others’ output to achieve short-term leaderboard rankings.”

It might be difficult to verify whether ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, follows this policy. Yet the news comes after another big AI player in China, Alibaba, banned employees from using a world-class AI, Anthropic’s Claude, to avoid any charges of distillation.

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If AI firms now move toward honesty and hard work in their research, it could dispel a big worry about the world economy. AI stocks are currently riding high, but investors are concerned that a grand theft of data by a few AI companies might bring down financial markets.

Innovation has long relied on the integrity of inventors to ensure the authenticity of their creativity and toil. Such honesty could be the bedrock for a global effort to both reap the rewards of AI and rein in its worst aspects.