The White House warned Thursday that “foreign entities” are allegedly carrying out “industrial-scale” campaigns to copy the capabilities of American-based artificial intelligence models, using tactics including jailbreaking and networks of fake accounts to extract proprietary information and replicate their performance.
According to President Donald Trump’s administration, the campaigns are using “tens of thousands of proxy accounts” to evade detection and exploit jailbreak techniques to systematically extract capabilities, in what is known as a distillation attack.
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.
Models developed through unauthorized distillation campaigns may not match the full performance of the originals. Still, they can appear comparable on select benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.
The administration warned that distillation attacks could also 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.
While the memo acknowledged that lawful distillation can help create smaller, more efficient open-source and open-weight models, it said 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.
The Office of Science and Technology did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.
