China stealing U.S. AI technology: White House official

A person types on a laptop computer during an artificial intelligence roundtable attended by AI experts and leaders from across Canada in Gatineau, Que., on Monday, May 27, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

The White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of a massive effort to steal U.S. artificial intelligence technology and vowed to take action to prevent the alleged theft.

“The U.S. 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.”

Distillation is a common practice within AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models.

In February, U.S. 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.

That same month, ChatGPT creator OpenAI sent a letter to U.S. legislators accusing DeepSeek of using distillation techniques amid “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other U.S. frontier labs.”

Kratsios did not name any specific foreign entities in his post but said they “are using tens of thousands of proxies and jailbreaking techniques in coordinated campaigns to systematically extract American breakthroughs.”

The accusations come ahead of a planned May 14 summit in Beijing between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.