The White House on Thursday accused China of stealing U.S. artificial intelligence labsâ intellectual property on an industrial scale in a memo that threatens to strain relations ahead of a summit between U.S. and Chinese leaders next month.
âThe US government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distil US frontier AI systems,â Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a memo shared on social media on Thursday and first reported by the Financial Times.
âLeveraging tens of thousands of proxy accounts to evade detection and using jailbreaking techniques to expose proprietary information, these coordinated campaigns systematically extract capabilities from American AI models, exploiting American expertise and innovation,â he added.
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The Chinese Embassy in Washington said it opposes âthe baseless allegations,â adding that Beijing âattaches great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights.â
The memo, released just weeks before U.S. President Donald Trump is set to visit Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, promises to raise tensions in a long-running tech war between the rival superpowers, which had been lowered by a detente brokered last October.
It also raises questions about whether Washington will allow Nvidiaâs NVDA.O powerful AI chips to be shipped to China. The Trump administration gave a green light to the sales in January, with conditions. On Wednesday, however, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick indicated that no shipments had yet been made.
Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using the output of larger ones as part of an effort to lower the costs of training a powerful new AI tool.
The memo, addressed to government agencies, says the administration will share information with American AI companies about the distillation efforts, and âexplore a range of measures to hold foreign actors accountableâ for the campaigns.
From what Iâve seen and heard of Trumps doing thus far, heâs always the first to accuse someone else of what heâs doing. Throw out the distractions, the chaff first. The master manipulator at it again. World beware, this man will use AI against the world. Heâs all about dominance now to save his butt.