SAN FRANCISCO, United States: The White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of a massive effort to steal US artificial intelligence technology, and vowed to take action to prevent the alleged theft.
“The US has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI,” White House science and technology chief Michael Kratsios said in a post on X.
“We will be taking action to protect American innovation.”
In February, US AI developer Anthropic accused three Chinese firms, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax, of running campaigns to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, describing it as intellectual property theft.Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using the output of larger ones as part of an effort to lower the costs of training a powerful new AI tool.
The memo, addressed to government agencies, says the administration will share information with American AI companies about the distillation efforts, and “explore a range of measures to hold foreign actors accountable” for the campaigns.
