The White House has accused Chinese entities of conducting large-scale clandestine campaigns to copy United States artificial intelligence models, labelling the activity as “industrial-scale distillation campaigns”.
Michael Kratsios, the White House’s technology adviser, stated on X (formerly Twitter) that foreign entities, primarily originating from China, are engaging in these operations to steal US AI systems.
According to a memo shared with federal agencies, these unnamed entities allegedly utilise tens of thousands of proxy accounts and sophisticated evasion methods to extract technological advances while avoiding detection, reports The Brussels Times.
The practice, known as “distillation,” involves training an AI model to mimic the capabilities of a more powerful model by learning from its responses. While this is a legal practice when conducted with permission, Kratsios emphasised that it is illegal when performed secretly.
The accusations follow specific claims from US-based AI companies. In late February, Anthropic accused three Chinese laboratories – DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax – of creating more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts.
These accounts reportedly initiated over 16 million interactions with Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, in an effort to reverse engineer its functionality and train their own systems.
Similarly, OpenAI previously accused DeepSeek of exploiting advanced circumvention techniques to secretly copy its AI models, according to a memo sent to the US Congress on 12 February.
Kratsios criticised the reliability of AI models built on such “unethical foundations,” suggesting that the producers of these models lack confidence in their integrity and dependability.
In response to these developments, the Trump administration has announced plans to share intelligence with US AI companies and explore potential measures against the responsible entities, though no specific actions have yet been disclosed.
The accusations come at a sensitive diplomatic juncture, just weeks ahead of a scheduled summit between Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on 14 May.
