“Distillation campaigns on an industrial scale”: the White House accuses China of clandestinely copying American AI

She denounces suspicious “foreign entities”. The White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of carrying out “industrial-scale” campaigns to clandestinely copy American artificial intelligence models.

“The United States has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are conducting industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI,” White House technology advisor Michael Kratsios said on X.

“Distillation” is a technique which consists of training an AI model on the responses of a more powerful model to reproduce its capabilities, legal when it is authorized, illicit when it is conducted clandestinely.

At the end of February, the company Anthropic itself accused three Chinese laboratories (DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax) of having created “more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts to generate more than 16 million exchanges with its Claude model”, in order to reconstruct its operation and train their own models.

“Tens of thousands of proxy accounts”

On February 12, in a memo addressed to the US Congress, OpenAI accused DeepSeek of clandestinely copying its AI models via sophisticated evasion techniques.

“These foreign entities,” not named by the White House, “use tens of thousands of proxy accounts” to evade detection “and evasion techniques to systematically extract American technological advances,” added Michael Kratsios, making public the memo he sent Thursday to American federal agencies.

“Foreign entities building on such shaky foundations must have little confidence in the integrity and reliability of the models they produce,” he quipped.

The Trump administration announced it would share intelligence with US AI companies and “explore measures” against those responsible, without specifying which ones.

This memo was made public less than three weeks before the planned summit between Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing on May 14.