Overview
- The White House science office, in a memo released Thursday, accused mostly China-based actors of running industrial-scale “distillation” operations that use tens of thousands of proxy accounts and jailbreaks to extract capabilities from U.S. AI models.
- The administration said it will share intelligence with American AI firms, help them build defenses against mass querying, and explore measures to hold foreign actors accountable.
- China’s embassy rejected the accusation as baseless and said Beijing values intellectual property rights.
- Distillation trains a smaller model on the outputs of a larger system, which can produce cheaper lookalikes and can remove safety guardrails when done without permission.
- The memo arrives weeks before President Trump’s planned talks with Xi Jinping, as a House committee backs a bipartisan bill to identify and sanction model extractors and experts warn that spotting illicit activity among vast volumes of legitimate queries will be difficult.