Washington on Thursday unveiled measures aimed at preventing Chinese developers from improperly using leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to build a rival generation of chatbots, marking the first major response to Silicon Valley companies’ complaints that China is piggybacking on their success.
In a memo, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said it would promote wider information sharing by US-based developers and increase efforts to help the industry detect unauthorized extraction of their AI models. The US government would also work with industry to determine how to rein in such abuses and hold bad actors accountable.
“There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the innovations of American industry, and there is nothing open about supposedly open models that are derived from acts of malicious exploitation,” White House Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios said in the memo.
Photo: AFP
The planned measures represent the most significant US effort so far to rein in a practice known as distillation, where AI developers train systems using results from a parent AI model to create similar capabilities in a new one at a far lower cost. Models made in this way avoid expenses from both research and the costly AI processors needed for original model training.
While tolerated for training smaller, less-advanced systems, distillation contravenes AI companies’ terms of use when it is employed to replicate a cutting-edge AI model without permission.
The White House in its memo clarified that the US supports a vibrant open-source ecosystem, but added that distillation aimed at undermining US research and development investments is unacceptable.
The broader effort to crack down on unauthorized distillation seeks to address a growing concern among US companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and Alphabet Inc’s Google, that output from their models is being wrongfully used by Chinese rivals such as DeepSeek (深度求索), Moonshot and MiniMax (稀宇科技) to develop products far more cheaply and with fewer safety guardrails.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy defines wrongful “industrial-scale” distillation as when foreign entities, primarily based in China, deploy “tens of thousands” of proxy accounts to access leading models and bombard them with queries deliberately aimed at extracting proprietary information that can be used to clone some of the model’s capabilities.
Though using so-called jail-breaking techniques can result in a nearly-free open-weight Chinese model that mimics a closed-weight US version, the statement warns that unauthorized actors can strip safety protocols through this method, resulting in models that are neither neutral nor truthful.
“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,” Kratsios said in the memo.
Top US developers are widely viewed as still being ahead of their Chinese rivals in terms of AI capabilities. Yet at least three US firms have begun to raise the alarm that adversarial distillation poses a risk to their businesses and started sharing information with each other on unauthorized extraction of their models’ output. The US government would now join that effort, with a focus on informing companies about the tactics and actors involved.
Many models made by Chinese companies are open source and largely free for customers to use. That poses an economic challenge for US AI firms that have kept their systems proprietary, betting that users would pay for access and help offset the hundreds of billions of dollars the firms have spent on data centers and other infrastructure.
US officials estimate that illicit extraction of results is costing Silicon Valley billions of dollars in annual profit, a person familiar with the findings said.
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