Huawei’s AI Lab Fends Off Accusations It Copied Rival Models

Huawei Technologies Co.’s secretive AI research lab has pushed back against accusations it relied on rivals’ models to develop its own Pangu platform, taking the unusual step of rebutting claims about its artificial intelligence efforts.

The Pangu Pro MoE is the world’s first model of its kind to be trained on Ascend chips — Huawei’s answer to Nvidia Corp.’s AI accelerators — the lab said in a WeChat post over the weekend. While the company employed open-source code — as is “common practice” — Huawei said it respected intellectual property and stuck closely to licensing terms. This followed accusations posted on the coding platform Github that Pangu’s source code contained uncredited material from key rivals.