Chicago – April 24, 2026
The Donald Trump administration accused China of running “industrial-scale campaigns” to steal the capabilities of American AI models.
While the charge itself isn’t new — Anthropic and OpenAI have said Chinese rivals tried to illicitly extract information about their chatbots — the White House memo marks a serious escalation on the issue, weeks before US President Donald Trump is slated to travel to Beijing.
The administration said it would work with US AI firms to counter such campaigns; the companies themselves recently banded together to share information about so-called adversarial distillation attempts, in which a “teacher” AI model trains a “student” model. US companies are concerned Chinese AI labs are creating imitations of their chatbots, efforts that could hold national security implications.
