US Accuses China of Industrial-Scale AI Theft

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy accused foreign entities, primarily in China, of conducting industrial-scale campaigns to steal intellectual property from American artificial intelligence labs, according to a memorandum released on Thursday. The announcement, made just weeks before a planned summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing next month, highlights ongoing concerns over technology theft amid rising U.S.-China rivalry.

OSTP Director Michael Kratsios detailed the allegations in the memo, which he shared on social media. He stated that the U.S. government has evidence of coordinated efforts using tens of thousands of proxy accounts and jailbreaking techniques to extract capabilities from leading U.S. AI models. "The U.S. has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems," Kratsios wrote. These distillation processes involve training smaller, cheaper AI models based on the outputs of more advanced U.S. systems, allowing actors to simulate performance on key benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.