US accuses China of industrial-scale AI theft

The United States is preparing to crack down on China's allegedly "industrial-scale theft of American artificial intelligence labs' intellectual property," the Financial Times reported. Since the launch of DeepSeek, a Chinese model that OpenAI claimed was trained using outputs from its models, other AI firms have accused global rivals of using distillation to steal their intellectual property. In January, Google claimed that "commercially motivated" actors attempted to clone its Gemini AI chatbot In a memo reviewed Kratsios confirmed that the US is exploring measures "to hold foreign actors accountable for industrial-scale distillation campaigns." In an April report, the House's Select Committee on China advised that Congress should direct the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security and the Department of Justice to "treat model extraction as industrial espionage" and "impose penalties severe enough to deter Beijing's theft of American innovation.