White House accuses China of systematic theft of US AI tech – Charm

The US has accused China of stealing American AI models
Chinese actors allegedly used a proxy network and jailbreaking techniques
The accusation will likely strain US-China relations after a period of recompense

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 US government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distil US frontier AI systems.”

stealing aerospace secrets and industrial technology.

The memo strikes a different tone to previous accusations, with the White House stating, “There is nothing innovative about systemically extracting and copying the innovations of American industry, and there is nothing about supposedly open models that are derived from acts of malicious exploitation.”

Washington says it will take the following steps:

A section of a memorandum titled 'Adversarial Distillation of American AI Models' laying out how the Trump administration plans to deal with the threat.

(Image credit: Executive Office of the President)

In response, the Chinese Embassy in Washington issued a statement saying that it rejects “the baseless allegations,” and that Beijing “attaches great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights.”

The accusation is likely to strain US-China relations ahead of next month’s meeting. Tensions are also likely to rise as the US Congress passes its “largest significant export control mark-up in the history of Congress” that seeks to prevent China from accessing US tech – especially high-powered chips.

Restrictions on the sale of powerful chips to China were eased in January, with the possibility of some of Nvidia’s most powerful chips being sold on a case-by-case basis. But these exports have been thrown into question by the latest restrictions from Congress.

Nonetheless, China has proven itself capable of developing and training powerful AI models such as Deepseek and OpenClaw – both of which have rattled American AI developers as China was believed to be years behind the US.