distillation attacks

US preparing crackdown on China's alleged AI intellectual property theft via distillation attacks

The US is preparing to crack down on China's alleged industrial-scale theft of American AI intellectual property through distillation attacks. White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios warned in a memo that foreign entities principally based in China are using tens of thousands of proxy accounts to distill US frontier AI systems. Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI have all accused Chinese firms of using distillation to clone their models. China has dismissed the accusations as pure slander, while Congress considers treating model extraction as industrial espionage.