The US is preparing to crack down on China's allegedly "industrial-scale theft of American artificial intelligence labs’ intellectual property," the Financial Times reported Thursday.
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 a method called distillation to steal their IP. In January, Google claimed that "commercially motivated" actors not limited to China 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." Also in February, OpenAI confirmed that most attacks it saw originated from China.
For the US, these distillation attacks supposedly threaten to help China quickly catch up in the AI race. In a memo that FT reviewed, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, 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."
