- The United States accused China of stealing American artificial intelligence models.
- Chinese Actors Allegedly Used Proxy Network and Jailbreak Techniques
- The indictment will likely strain relations between the United States and China after a period of payoff.
The White House has accused China of orchestrating a campaign to steal AI models from American developers on an “industrial scale.”
In a memo, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said: “The United States government has information indicating that foreign entities, primarily based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill artificial intelligence systems at the United States border.”
The accusations come ahead of a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing next month.
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‘Tens of thousands of proxies and jailbreak techniques’
“Leveraging tens of thousands of proxy accounts to evade detection and using jailbreaking techniques to expose proprietary information, these coordinated campaigns systematically extract capabilities from American AI models, exploiting American expertise and innovation,” the White House memo continues.
This is not the first time China has been accused of stealing American technology, as the superpower has previously been in the crosshairs for stealing aerospace secrets and industrial technology.
The memo takes a different tone than previous accusations, with the White House stating: “There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the innovations of American industry, and there is nothing about supposedly open models that derive from acts of malicious exploitation.”
Washington says it will take the following steps:
In response, the Chinese Embassy in Washington issued a statement saying it rejects “the groundless accusations” and that Beijing “attaches great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights.”
The accusation is likely to strain relations between the United States and China ahead of next month’s meeting. Tensions are also likely to rise as the US Congress passes its “largest scope for significant export controls in congressional history” that seeks to prevent China from accessing US technology, especially high-powered chips.
Restrictions on the sale of powerful chips to China were eased in January, with the possibility that some of Nvidia’s most powerful chips could be sold on a case-by-case basis. But these exports have been called into question by Congress’s latest restrictions.
However, China has proven capable of developing and training powerful AI models such as Deepseek and OpenClaw, which have worried American AI developers as China was believed to be years behind the United States.
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