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The Trump administration<\/a> on Thursday accused Chinese entities of waging “industrial-scale campaigns” to rip off U.S. artificial intelligence<\/a> systems, and said it will explore ways to hold the foreign actors accountable.<\/p>\n “There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the innovations of American industry,” Michael Kratsios<\/a>, the top science and technology advisor to President Donald Trump<\/a>, said in a memo<\/a> on alleged Chinese “distillation” operations to train smaller AI models off of larger ones.<\/p>\n The U.S. government has previously accused China<\/a> of targeting American AI technology and intellectual property<\/a>.<\/p>\n Kratsios warned that as it gets easier to detect and prevent large-scale “distillation” operations, the entities that “build their AI capabilities on such fragile foundations” should lose confidence in “the integrity and reliability of the models they produce.”<\/p>\n U.S. information indicates that the campaigns to “distill” U.S. frontier AI systems are coming from mostly China-based entities, he said.<\/p>\n The efforts involve using tens of thousands of proxy accounts and jailbreaking techniques to secretly “expose proprietary information,” Kratsios said.<\/p>\n Attempts to copy U.S. models through “surreptitious, unauthorized distillation campaigns” won’t result in AI systems with the same performance as the originals, the advisor noted.<\/p>\n But they “enable foreign actors to release products that appear to perform comparably on select benchmarks at a fraction of the cost,” he said.<\/p>\n Read more CNBC politics coverage<\/p>\n They also enable the distillers to “deliberately strip security protocols from the resulting models and undo mechanisms that ensure those AI models are ideologically neutral and truth-seeking,” according to Kratsios.<\/p>\n The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond when asked for comment on the memo.<\/p>\n Distillation is not inherently in conflict with a competitive AI ecosystem, and it can play a “vital” role when “legitimately used to produce smaller, lighter-weight models from more advanced systems,” Kratsios said.<\/p>\n “Industrial distillation activities that aim to systematically undermine American research and development and access proprietary information, however, are unacceptable,” he said.<\/p>\n The Trump administration will respond by sharing information with U.S. AI companies about the adversarial campaigns, “including the tactics employed and actors involved.”<\/p>\n It will also “explore a range of measures to hold foreign actors accountable,” Kratsios said.<\/p>\n \u2014 CNBC’s Megan Cassella<\/a> contributed to this report.<\/p>\n