China · Ars Technica
US accuses China of “industrial-scale” AI theft
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The US is preparing to crack down on China’s allegedly “industrial-scale theft of American artificial intelligence labs’ intellectual property,” the Financial Times reported Thursday.
Key facts
- In January, Google claimed that “commercially motivated” actors not limited to China attempted to clone its Gemini AI chatbot by promoting the model more than 100,000 times in bids to train cheaper
- Specifically, the committee recommended that the State Department assess whether the distillation attacks violate laws like the Economic Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
- Kratsios’ memo threatening a crackdown comes ahead of Donald Trump’s highly anticipated meeting with China’s president Xi Jinping next month
- The US is preparing to crack down on China’s allegedly “industrial-scale theft of American artificial intelligence labs’ intellectual property,” the Financial Times reported Thursday
Summary
Since the launch of DeepSeek—a Chinese model that OpenAI claimed was trained using outputs from its models —other AI firms have accused global rivals of using a method called distillation to steal their IP. For the US, these distillation attacks supposedly threaten to help China quickly catch up in the AI race. According to Kratsios, Chinese campaigns were “leveraging tens of thousands of proxy accounts to evade detection and using jailbreaking techniques to expose proprietary information.” His memo said that US firms would soon gain access to government information to help them combat the apparent attacks. Kratsios confirmed in his memo that the US is exploring measures “to hold foreign actors accountable for industrial-scale distillation campaigns.”