White House Accuses China of Copying US AI Companies

The White House accuses China of secretly and on a large scale copying American Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies.

According to the White House, Chinese entities are conducting campaigns "on an industrial scale" to copy American AI models. Michael Kratsios, White House technology policy advisor, stated that the US has evidence of these activities.

The technique used is "distillation," where an AI model is trained on the responses of a more powerful model. While distillation is legal when permitted, it becomes illegal when conducted secretly.

The company Anthropic had accused three Chinese AI laboratories (DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax) of creating fake accounts to reconstruct the operation of the Claude model. OpenAI also accused DeepSeek of copying its models through bypass techniques.

The White House announced that it will share information with American AI companies and will investigate measures against those responsible. The memorandum was released shortly before the summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping on May 14.