The White House has mentioned it will work more closely with US artificial intelligence (AI) firms to combat “industrial-scale campaigns” by foreign actors to steal advances in the tech. This also touches on aspects of geopolitics.

Michael Kratsios, Director of Science and Software Policy, wrote in an internal memo that the administration had novel information indicating “foreign entities, principally based in China” were exploiting American firms.

Through a process called “distilling”, such firms are essentially copying AI tech developed by US companies, he mentioned.

A representative of China’s US embassy in Washington DC mentioned its development was “international cooperation along with the result of its own dedication and effort”.

In the memo, Kratsios stated the aim was to “systematically undermine American research and development and access proprietary information”.

In an attempt avoid and halt “malicious exploitation,” he noted the White House will be doing four things:

sharing more information with US AI companies about “tactics employed and actors involved” in distillation campaigns

working to “better coordinate” with companies to fight the attacks

develop a set of “best practices to identify, mitigate, and remediate” them

“explore” how the White House can hold foreign actors accountable for such distillation

The memo did not detail any specific plans for action against foreign entities found to be undertaking distillation of US AI digital systems.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment beyond the memo.

A representative of China’s US embassy in Washington DC took issue with “the unjustified suppression of Chinese companies by the US” in response to the memo

“China is not only the world’s factory but is also becoming the world’s innovation lab,” the representative added.

“China’international cooperation that delivers mutual benefits along with s development is the result of its own dedication and effort.”

Distillation campaigns are carried out by firms that usually operate many thousands of individual accounts for a given AI chatbot or tool, allowing them to appear as normal users.

Those accounts then undertake more coordinated attempts to “jailbreak” or otherwise expose information about AI models that is not supposed to be made public, which is saved and applied to their own AI model building and training.

“As methods to detect and mitigate industrial-scale distillation grow more sophisticated, foreign entities who build their AI capabilities on such fragile foundations should have little confidence in the integrity and reliability of the models they produce,” Kratsios stated.

While Kratsios did not name any foreign entities, leading AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have mentioned they are dealing with such distillation activity.

Earlier this year, Anthropic described distillation “attacks” by three AI laboratories, DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax, saying it had found them all to be working to copy Anthropic models through distillation campaigns. All three of the labs are based in China.

OpenAI has also accused DeepSeek of copying its tech.

DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax did not immediately respond to BBC requests for comment.

DeepSeek was initially released last year and quickly became one of the most popular AI models and chatbots among users.

The firm mentioned at the time that the model cost only a few million dollars to create, a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by other AI firms to build their models and tools.

Last month, the DeepSeek chatbot suffered a major outage. It is expected to soon release a novel version of its AI model.

US President Donald Trump is expected to visit China in May.

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