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WASHINGTON — <\/span>The Trump administration is vowing to crack down on foreign tech companies’ exploitation of U.S. artificial intelligence<\/a> models, singling out China at a time that country is narrowing the gap with the U.S. in the AI race.<\/p>\n In a Thursday memo, Michael Kratsios, the president’s chief science and technology adviser, accused foreign entities \u201cprincipally based in China\u201d of engaging in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to \u201cdistill,\u201d or extract capabilities from, leading AI systems made in the U.S. and \u201cexploiting American expertise and innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n The administration, Kratsios wrote, will work with American AI companies to identify such activities, build defenses and find ways to punish offenders.<\/p>\n The memo arrives at a time when China is challenging U.S. dominance<\/a> in artificial intelligence, an area where the White House says the U.S. must prevail to set global standards and reap economic and military benefits. But the U.S.-China gap in performance of top AI models has \u201ceffectively closed,\u201d according to a recent report from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI.<\/p>\n China’s embassy in Washington said it opposed \u201cthe unjustified suppression of Chinese companies by the U.S.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cChina has always been committed to promoting scientific and technological progress through cooperation and healthy competition. China attaches great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights,\u201d said Liu Pengyu, the embassy spokesperson.<\/p>\n Kratsios’ memo also came the same week that the House Foreign Affairs Committee offered unanimous, bipartisan support for a bill to set up a process to identify foreign actors that extract \u201ckey technical features\u201d of closed-source, U.S.-owned AI models and to punish them with measures including sanctions.<\/p>\n \u201cModel extraction attacks are the latest frontier of Chinese economic coercion and theft of U.S. intellectual property,\u201d said Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., who sponsored the bill. \u201cAmerican AI models are demonstrating transformative cyber capabilities, and it is critical we prevent China from stealing these technological advancements.\u201d<\/p>\n Last year, the Chinese start-up DeepSeek rattled U.S. markets<\/a> when it released a large language model that could compete with U.S. AI giants but at a fraction of the cost. <\/p>\n David Sacks, then serving as President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto adviser, suggested<\/a> that DeepSeek copied U.S. models. \u201cThere\u2019s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI\u2019s models,\u201d Sacks said then. <\/p>\n In a February letter to U.S. lawmakers, OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, made similar allegations and said China should not be allowed to advance \u201cautocratic AI\u201d by \u201cappropriating and repackaging American innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic<\/a>, the maker of the Claude chatbot, in February accused DeepSeek and two other China-based AI laboratories of engaging in campaigns to \u201cillicitly extract Claude\u2019s capabilities to improve their own models\u201d using the distillation technique that \u201cinvolves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic said distillation can be a legitimate way to train AI systems but it’s a problem when competitors \u201cuse it to acquire powerful capabilities from other labs in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it would take to develop them independently.\u201d<\/p>\n But it can go both ways. San Francisco-based startup Anysphere, maker of the popular coding tool Cursor, recently acknowledged that its latest product was based on an open-source model made by Chinese company Moonshot AI, maker of the chatbot Kimi.<\/p>\n Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Washington-based think tank The Brookings Institution and an expert on China’s technology development, said it will be like \u201clooking for needles in an enormous haystack\u201d to separate unauthorized distillation from the vast volume of legitimate requests for data. But information sharing and coordination among U.S. AI labs could help, and the federal government can play an important role in facilitating anti-distillation efforts across labs, Chan said.<\/p>\n It’s hard to assess how far the House bill can go, but Chan said Trump may not want to rock the boat with Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of a planned mid-May state visit<\/a> to Beijing.<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report from Providence, Rhode Island.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n