The Financial Times reported Thursday that the White House has accused China of conducting what it calls “industrial-scale” theft of American artificial intelligence technology.
Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a memo seen by the FT that “foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distil U.S. frontier AI systems,” referring to a process whereby AI scientists extract the capabilities of an existing model to create a new one.
The administration will also pursue measures “to hold foreign actors accountable,” Kratsios wrote, according to the FT.
The Chinese government denied the allegations, with embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu calling the accusations “pure slander.”
Kratsios previously served on the board of Scale AI, a data-labeling company. Company presentations described Scale as the “ammo factory” for “AI wars.”
U.S. AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI earlier this year said that efficiency gains by Chinese AI companies were due to distillation.
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