The White House has formally accused foreign entities, primarily in China, of conducting "industrial-scale" campaigns to copy the capabilities of American artificial intelligence models. In a memorandum titled "Adversarial Distillation of American AI Models," Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, stated that the U.S. government has evidence of coordinated efforts to distill U.S. frontier AI systems.
According to the Trump administration, these campaigns employ "tens of thousands of proxy accounts" and jailbreak techniques to systematically extract proprietary information and model capabilities. This method, known as a distillation attack, involves training a smaller AI model using the outputs of a larger one. The administration warned that such attacks could also remove security safeguards designed to keep AI systems "ideologically neutral and truth-seeking."
In February, AI company Anthropic accused Chinese AI labs DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of extracting millions of Claude responses using roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts to train competing systems. While models developed through unauthorized distillation may not match the full performance of the originals, they can appear comparable on select benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.
The administration has stated that federal agencies will work with U.S. AI companies to strengthen protections around frontier models, coordinate with private industry to develop defenses against large-scale distillation campaigns, and explore ways to hold foreign actors accountable. The memo acknowledged that lawful distillation can aid in creating smaller, more efficient open-source models, but asserted that unauthorized copying crosses the line, stating, "There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the innovations of American industry."
In a related development, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed that Nvidia's H200 chips have not yet been sent to Chinese firms, citing difficulties obtaining permission from the Chinese government. The Trump administration formally approved China-bound sales of H200 chips in January, but shipments remain blocked by disagreements over sale terms in both the U.S. and China.
