The White House accuses China of AI theft

The White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of conducting a massive effort to steal US artificial intelligence (AI) technology, and vowed to take action to prevent the alleged theft. So, what should you know about it?

Distillation is a common practice in AI development

For your information, distillation is a common practice in AI development, often used by companies to produce smaller, cheaper versions of their models. In February, US AI developer Anthropic accused three Chinese firms, such as DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax, of running a campaign to illegally extract the capabilities of the Claude chatbot, calling it intellectual property theft.

"The US has evidence that foreign entities, particularly in China, are conducting an industrial-scale distillation campaign to steal American AI," said White House science and technology chief Michael Kratsios in a post on the X platform. “We will take action to protect American innovation.”

Additionally, that same month, ChatGPT's creator, OpenAI, sent a letter to US lawmakers accusing DeepSeek of using distillation techniques in a "continued effort to hijack capabilities developed by OpenAI and other advanced AI labs in the US."

Moreover, Kratsios did not name any foreign entities specifically in his post, but said they were “using tens of thousands of proxies and jailbreak techniques in a coordinated campaign to systematically extract American achievements.” The allegations come ahead of a summit planned for May 14 in Beijing between US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping

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