US to Partner with AI Firms to Counter Chinese Tech Theft

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in an internal memo claimed new information that foreign entities were exploiting US firms through a process known as "distillation," a report from BBC said.

Kratsios claimed that the Chinese design aims to systematically undermine American research and development and access proprietary information.

To counter these practices, White House will share more information with US AI companies about "tactics employed and actors involved" in distillation campaigns.

It also plans to improve coordination with companies to fight the attacks and develop a set of "best practices to identify, mitigate, and remediate" them. Further, it will "explore" ways to hold these foreign actors accountable for such distillation.

Through distillation campaigns, firms usually operate many thousands of individual accounts for a given AI chatbot or tool, allowing them to appear as normal users.

"Those accounts then undertake more coordinated attempts to "jailbreak" or otherwise expose information about AI models that is not supposed to be made public, which is saved and applied to their own AI model building and training," the report explained.

"As methods to detect and mitigate industrial-scale distillation grow more sophisticated, foreign entities who build their AI capabilities on such fragile foundations should have little confidence in the integrity and reliability of the models they produce," it quoted Kratsios as saying.

A representative of China's US embassy in Washington DC rejected the allegation, saying China's technological development was the result of "its own dedication and effort as well as international cooperation".

United States-based artificial intelligence firm Anthropic had in March accused three Chinese unicorns- DeepSeek, Minimax and Moonshot AI - of having illegally extracted capabilities from its Claude model to advance their own systems.

- IANS