FILE - White House director of 国产诱惑福利 and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios speaks during a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education in the East Room of the White House, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
FILE - White House director of 国产诱惑福利 and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios speaks during a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education in the East Room of the White House, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) 鈥 The Trump administration is vowing to crack down on foreign tech companies' exploitation of U.S. artificial intelligence models, singling out China at a time that country is narrowing the gap with the U.S. in the AI race.
In a Thursday memo, Michael Kratsios, the president's chief science and technology adviser, accused foreign entities 鈥減rincipally based in China鈥 of engaging in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to 鈥渄istill,鈥 or extract capabilities from, leading AI systems made in the U.S. and 鈥渆xploiting American expertise and innovation.鈥
The administration, Kratsios wrote, will work with American AI companies to identify such activities, build defenses and find ways to punish offenders.
The memo arrives at a time when China is in artificial intelligence, an area where the White House says the U.S. must prevail to set global standards and reap economic and military benefits. But the U.S.-China gap in performance of top AI models has 鈥渆ffectively closed,鈥 according to a recent report from Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI.
China's embassy in Washington said it opposed 鈥渢he unjustified suppression of Chinese companies by the U.S.鈥
鈥淐hina has always been committed to promoting scientific and technological progress through cooperation and healthy competition. China attaches great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights,鈥 said Liu Pengyu, the embassy spokesperson.
Kratsios' memo also came the same week that the House Foreign Affairs Committee offered unanimous, bipartisan support for a bill to set up a process to identify foreign actors that extract 鈥渒ey technical features鈥 of closed-source, U.S.-owned AI models and to punish them with measures including sanctions.
鈥淢odel extraction attacks are the latest frontier of Chinese economic coercion and theft of U.S. intellectual property,鈥 said Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., who sponsored the bill. 鈥淎merican AI models are demonstrating transformative cyber capabilities, and it is critical we prevent China from stealing these technological advancements.鈥
Last year, the Chinese start-up DeepSeek when it released a large language model that could compete with U.S. AI giants but at a fraction of the cost.
David Sacks, then serving as President Donald Trump's AI and crypto adviser, that DeepSeek copied U.S. models. 鈥淭here鈥檚 substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI鈥檚 models,鈥 Sacks said then.
In a February letter to U.S. lawmakers, OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, made similar allegations and said China should not be allowed to advance 鈥渁utocratic AI鈥 by 鈥渁ppropriating and repackaging American innovation.鈥
, the maker of the Claude chatbot, in February accused DeepSeek and two other China-based AI laboratories of engaging in campaigns to 鈥渋llicitly extract Claude鈥檚 capabilities to improve their own models鈥 using the distillation technique that 鈥渋nvolves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.鈥
Anthropic said distillation can be a legitimate way to train AI systems but it's a problem when competitors 鈥渦se it to acquire powerful capabilities from other labs in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it would take to develop them independently.鈥
But it can go both ways. San Francisco-based startup Anysphere, maker of the popular coding tool Cursor, recently acknowledged that its latest product was based on an open-source model made by Chinese company Moonshot AI, maker of the chatbot Kimi.
Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Washington-based think tank The Brookings Institution and an expert on China's technology development, said it will be like 鈥渓ooking for needles in an enormous haystack鈥 to separate unauthorized distillation from the vast volume of legitimate requests for data. But information sharing and coordination among U.S. AI labs could help, and the federal government can play an important role in facilitating anti-distillation efforts across labs, Chan said.
It's hard to assess how far the House bill can go, but Chan said Trump may not want to rock the boat with Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of a to Beijing.
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AP Technology Writer Matt O'Brien contributed to this report from Providence, Rhode Island.
