The White House has accused China of orchestrating industrial-scale theft of US artificial intelligence intellectual property, according to a memo shared by Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The allegations come weeks before President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, detailed the allegations in a memo shared on social media. The US government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems, Kratsios said. The campaigns leverage tens of thousands of proxy accounts and jailbreaking techniques to extract capabilities from American AI models, according to Kratsios. The alleged 'distillation' process involves training smaller AI models using the output of larger ones to reduce costs. The Chinese Embassy in Washington rejected the claims, calling them 'baseless allegations' and asserting that Beijing attaches great importance to intellectual property protection.
baseless allegations
The accusations cast doubt on the future of Nvidia's powerful AI chip shipments to China. The Trump administration approved Nvidia's AI chip sales to China with conditions in January. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick indicated on Wednesday that no shipments of Nvidia's AI chips to China have yet occurred.
The memo emerges weeks before President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. The White House memo pledges to share intelligence with American AI companies regarding distillation efforts and to explore measures to hold foreign actors accountable. It remains unclear what specific evidence the US government has to support the allegations or how the upcoming Trump-Xi summit will be affected.
attaches great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights