Washington– The Trump administration has pledged to crack down on foreign technology companies exploiting the United States artificial intelligence Models, and he singled out China at a time when it is working to narrow the gap with the United States in the artificial intelligence race.
In a memo issued Thursday, Michael Kratsios, the president’s senior adviser on science and technology, accused foreign entities “headquartered in China” of engaging in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to “extract” or extract capabilities from leading AI systems made in the United States and “exploit American expertise and innovation.”
The administration will work with American AI companies to identify such activities, build defenses, and find ways to punish violators, Kratsios wrote.
The memo arrives at a time when China is also Challenging American hegemony In the field of artificial intelligence, an area where the White House says the United States must prevail to set global standards and reap the economic and military benefits. But the gap between the United States and China in the performance of the best AI models has “virtually closed,” according to a recent report from Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute.
China’s embassy in Washington said it opposes “the unjustified suppression of Chinese companies by the United States.”
“China 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,” said Liu Bingyu, an embassy spokesman.
Kratsios’ memo also came the same week that the House Foreign Affairs Committee gave unanimous, bipartisan support for a bill to create a process to identify foreign actors that extract “key technical features” of US-owned closed AI models and punish them with measures including sanctions.
“Model mining attacks are the latest frontier of Chinese economic coercion and the theft of American intellectual property,” said Michigan Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga, who sponsored the bill. “US AI models demonstrate transformative cyber capabilities, and it is critical that we prevent China from stealing these technological advances.”
Last year, Chinese startup DeepSeek US markets were shaken When it released a major language model that could compete with US AI giants but at a fraction of the cost.
David Sachs, who was then serving as an AI and cryptocurrency advisor to President Donald Trump, Suggested That DeepSeek copied American models. “There is strong evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they extracted knowledge from OpenAI models,” Sachs said at the time.
In a February letter to US lawmakers, OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, made similar claims and said China should not be allowed to promote “authoritarian AI” by “seizing and reorganizing American innovation.”
AnthropicIn February, DeepSeek, the maker of the Claude chatbot, accused DeepSeek and two other AI labs in China of engaging in campaigns to “illicitly mine Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models” using a distillation technique that “involves training a less capable model on the output of a stronger model.”
Anthropic said distillation can be a legitimate way to train AI systems, but it is problematic when competitors use 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.”
But it can go both ways. San Francisco-based startup Anysphere, maker of the popular encryption tool Cursor, recently admitted that its latest product is based on an open-source model made by Chinese company Moonshot AI, maker of chatbot Kimi.
Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution and an expert on technology development in China, said it would be like “looking for needles in an enormous haystack” to separate unauthorized dripping from the massive volume of legitimate requests for data. But information sharing and coordination between U.S. AI labs can help, and the federal government can play an important role in facilitating anti-distillation efforts across labs, Chan said.
It is difficult to assess how far the House bill could go, but Chan said Trump may not want to radically change relations with Chinese President Xi Jinping before the presidential election. State visit scheduled for mid-May To Beijing.
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AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report from Providence, Rhode Island.