US vows to fight ‘industrial scale’ AI theft by Chinese firms

The Trump administration has unveiled plans to combat “industrial-scale campaigns” by Chinese-based entities to copy AI technology developed by US companies. 

In a statement on Thursday, the assistant to the president for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael J. Kratsios, said the government has "information" indicating that foreign entities — primarily based in China — are deliberately targeting major US AI firms to distill their AI models.

"Models developed from surreptitious, unauthorized distillation campaigns like this do not replicate the full performance of the original. They do, however, enable foreign actors to release products that appear to perform comparably on select benchmarks at a fraction of the cost," Kratsios said.

The statement from the US government comes just two months after Claude-developer Anthropic accused three Chinese AI firms of engaging in distillation attacks on its AI models.

Meanwhile, the White House warned that models developed through these distillation campaigns allow actors to produce cheaper models that are stripped of security protocols, moving them away from being "neutral and truth-seeking."

According to data from Morph LLM, the current per-million-token pricing of frontier AI models such as Claude’s Opus 4.6 costs $5, while Chat GPT-5.4 Pro costs up to $30. China’s DeepSeek V3.2, described as a mid-tier model, costs only $0.26.   

Tech investor Jason Calacanis said in a recent interview with the "All-In" podcast that he has been paying around $300 per day to use Anthropic AI agents to help run his businesses. 

Source: White House OSTP 47

White House to coordinate with private AI sector

The White House OSTP said the Trump administration will seek to counter threats from foreign firms by sharing information with US companies about potentially large attacks, helping the private sector better coordinate against them, working with the private sector to build strong defenses, and exploring measures to "hold foreign actors accountable."

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The White House OSTP said that the foreign companies have been using "tens of thousands of proxy accounts" to fly under the radar while "using jailbreaking techniques to expose proprietary information."

"These coordinated campaigns systematically extract capabilities from American AI models, exploiting American expertise and innovation," it said.

In Anthropic's case, the firm accused DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax in late February of generating "over 16 million exchanges" with its AI models combined across about 24,000 "fraudulent accounts."

The firm said the companies were trying to scrape Claude for capabilities such as agentic reasoning, coding and data analysis, rubric-based grading tasks, and computer vision. 

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