White House Accuses China-Linked Actors of Industrial-Scale AI Model Theft

The White House has accused China-linked actors and other foreign entities of running industrial-scale AI model extraction and distillation campaigns against U.S. frontier AI companies, saying the operations use tens of thousands of proxy or fraudulent accounts, jailbreaking techniques, distributed probing, and iterative prompt engineering to copy proprietary model behavior at scale. A memorandum from Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios said the activity targets American AI innovation without requiring a traditional network breach, and warned that derivative systems may reproduce benchmark performance while stripping away safety controls, neutrality safeguards, and other protections built into the original models.

Federal agencies have been directed to expand information sharing with AI firms and develop best practices for detecting, mitigating, and remediating the campaigns, with officials pointing to stronger telemetry, logging, identity controls, and real-time detection of distributed abuse as likely defenses. The administration is also weighing accountability measures, including possible sanctions and legal or export-control actions, while lawmakers advance legislation to identify and punish foreign actors targeting U.S.-owned AI models; China has rejected the allegations as "slander" and unjustified suppression, even as prior claims from OpenAI and Anthropic tied Chinese firms including DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax to large-scale distillation efforts.