Trump admin. warns China entities are ripping off U.S. AI tech
The Trump administration on Thursday accused Chinese organizations of waging “industrial-scale campaigns” to rip off U.S. artificial intelligence systems and said it would explore ways to hold foreign actors accountable.
“There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying innovations from American industry,” Michael Kratsios, President Donald Trump’s chief science and technology adviser, said in a speech. memory About China’s alleged “distillation” operations to train smaller AI models from larger AI models.
The US government has previously accused China of targeting American artificial intelligence technology and intellectual property.
As it becomes easier to detect and prevent large-scale “distillation” operations, Kratsios warned that organizations “building their AI capabilities on such fragile foundations” must lose confidence in “the integrity and reliability of the models they produce.”
US information shows that campaigns to “distill” US border AI systems are mostly coming from China-based organizations.
The efforts involved using tens of thousands of proxy accounts and jailbreaking techniques to “reveal private information,” Kratsios said.
Attempts to copy US models through “secret, unauthorized distillation campaigns” will not lead to AI systems having the same performance as the originals, the consultant said.
But these “allow foreign actors to launch products that demonstrate comparable performance on certain metrics at a fraction of the cost,” he said.
These also allow distillers to “intentionally remove safety protocols from the resulting models and undo the mechanisms that ensure these AI models are ideologically neutral and truth-seeking,” according to Kratsios.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond when asked for comment on the memo.
Kratsios said distillation is not inherently in conflict with a competitive AI ecosystem and could play a “vital” role “when used legitimately to produce smaller, lighter models from more advanced systems.”
“But industrial distillation activities aimed at systematically undermining American research and development and gaining access to proprietary information are unacceptable,” he said.
The Trump administration will respond by sharing information with U.S. AI companies about opposition campaigns, “including tactics used and actors involved.”
Kratsios said he would also “explore a range of measures to hold foreign actors accountable.”
— CNBC’s Megan Cassella contributed to this report.
