White House Accuses China of 'Industrial-Scale' AI Model Theft

The White House warned on April 23, 2026, that foreign entities, primarily in China, are conducting “industrial-scale” campaigns to copy American artificial intelligence models, according to a memorandum from Michael Kratsios, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The campaigns employ tens of thousands of proxy accounts and jailbreaking techniques to extract proprietary capabilities and replicate model performance, a method known as distillation attack.

Tactics and Methods

According to President Donald Trump’s administration, the coordinated efforts use “tens of thousands of proxy accounts” to evade detection and exploit jailbreak techniques to systematically extract capabilities. A distillation attack is a method of training a smaller AI model to learn from the outputs of a larger one. Kratsios stated on X (formerly Twitter): “The U.S. has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI. We will be taking action to protect American innovation.”

Historical Precedent

The issue has become a growing concern among U.S. AI companies. In February 2026, Anthropic accused Chinese AI labs DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of extracting millions of Claude responses—using roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts—to train competing systems. Models developed through unauthorized distillation campaigns may not match the full performance of the originals but can appear comparable on select benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.

Security Concerns

The administration warned that distillation attacks could remove security safeguards and other controls designed to keep AI systems “ideologically neutral and truth-seeking.” The Trump administration said federal agencies will work with U.S. AI companies to strengthen protections around frontier models, coordinate with private industry to develop defenses against large-scale distillation campaigns, and explore ways to hold foreign actors accountable.

Administration Response

While the memorandum acknowledged that lawful distillation can help create smaller, more efficient open-source and open-weight models, it stated that unauthorized efforts to copy American AI systems cross the line. “There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the innovations of American industry,” the memo said.