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 by promoting the model more than 100,000 times in bids to train cheaper copycats. The next month, Anthropic accused Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of using the same tactic to generate "over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts." OpenAI confirmed in February that most attacks it saw originated from China. In a memo reviewed by the Financial Times, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director Michael Kratsios warned that "the US government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems." Kratsios said Chinese campaigns were "leveraging tens of thousands of proxy accounts to evade detection and using jailbreaking techniques to expose proprietary information." His memo said US firms would soon gain access to government information to help them combat the attacks. 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.