White House Accuses China of 'Industrial Scale' AI Theft
A White House memo alleges Chinese entities are systematically distilling American AI technology at massive scale.
The White House is sounding the alarm on what it calls industrial-scale intellectual property theft targeting American AI. A new memo claims the administration has intelligence showing foreign entities — primarily based in China — are engaged in systematic "distillation" of U.S. AI technology.
Michael Kratsios, a Trump administration official, put it bluntly: Chinese entities are stealing from American labs.
Distillation is a technique where a smaller, cheaper model is trained to replicate the capabilities of a larger, more powerful one. Done at scale, it could let foreign actors clone the output of America's most advanced AI systems without doing the underlying research.
The memo signals the White House is laying groundwork for potential action. How far that goes — export controls, sanctions, or something else entirely — remains to be seen.