White House accuses China of ‘deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns’ to steal US AI models

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told federal agencies that the Trump administration will be enhancing its engagement with the private sector to counter foreign-led distillation campaigns designed to undermine U.S. AI advances.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on Thursday accused China and other foreign entities of engaging in “deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems,” and said that the Trump administration will be taking steps to safeguard domestic artificial intelligence products. 

In a memo sent to federal agencies, the White House office warned that these distillation campaigns — in which a deluge of requests are sent to an AI model in order to train a knockoff version of it — are allowing bad actors to steal proprietary information from U.S. companies.

“Models developed from surreptitious, unauthorized distillation campaigns like this do not replicate the full performance of the original ...