Perhaps not, but stealing is stealing.

Consider computers in the Soviet Union. Asianometry has a great video on this. Initial Soviet computers were promising, but fell behind American ones by several years, and the gap only worsened as time went on. Eventually, to close the gap, Party leadership made the decision to buy an IBM System/360 compatible computer from an enterprising American supplier and reverse engineer it. This closed the gap from roughly 15 years to roughly 5, but also meant the Soviets had no R&D talent of their own and had to keep buying American computers and reverse engineering them until American computers became too complicated for them to do so.