China steals US AI technology: White House official

SAN FRANCISCO: The White House on Thursday accused Chinese companies of a massive effort to steal American artificial intelligence technology and vowed to take steps to thwart the alleged theft.
“The United States has evidence that foreign entities, primarily from China, are conducting an industrial-scale distillation campaign to steal American AI,” White House Science and Technology Secretary Michael Kratsios said in a post on X.
“We will take action to protect American innovation.”
Distillation is a common technique in AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models.
In February, US AI developer Anthropic accused three Chinese companies, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax, of running a campaign to illegally extract functionality from its Claude chatbot, describing the move as intellectual property theft.
That same month, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, sent a letter to U.S. lawmakers accusing DeepSeek of using distillation techniques in “continued efforts to free-ride on capabilities developed by OpenAI and other U.S. frontier laboratories.”
Kratsios did not name specific foreign groups in his post, but said they are “using tens of thousands of proxies and jailbreak techniques in a coordinated campaign to systematically extract a breakthrough in the United States.”
The accusations were made ahead of a summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping scheduled for May 14 in Beijing.