Washington has vowed to curb what it sees as the unauthorized extraction of intellectual property from United States-developed artificial intelligence models, sharpening its stance just as China's DeepSeek unveiled its latest system.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) said on Thursday, April 23),that information indicated that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI models.

"Leveraging tens of thousands of proxy accounts to evade detection and using jailbreaking techniques to expose proprietary information, these coordinated campaigns systematically extract capabilities from American AI models, exploiting American expertise and innovation," Michael Kratsios, an assistant to the president for science and technology director, OSTP, said in a memorandum for the heads of US government departments and agencies. 

"Models developed from surreptitious, unauthorized distillation campaigns like this do not replicate the full performance of the original," he said. "They do, however, enable foreign actors to release products that appear to perform comparably on select benchmarks at a fraction of the cost."

He added that these distillation campaigns also allow those actors 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 the memorandum, the Trump administration will:

share intelligence with US AI companies on attempts by foreign actors to carry out unauthorized, industrial-scale distillation, including tactics used and actors involved;

enable closer coordination across the private sector to counter such activities;

partner with industry to develop best practices to detect, mitigate and remediate industrial-scale distillation, and to strengthen defenses;

explore measures to hold foreign actors accountable for industrial-scale distillation campaigns.

The warning came before the launch of DeepSeek V4 on Friday, April 24, highlighting growing concern in Washington over how Chinese developers are narrowing the gap with US frontier models.

DeepSeek, a Zhejiang-based company, has been explicit about its methods. In late January 2025, it said it used knowledge distillation techniques to train its V3 model, a process often likened to a student learning by asking a teacher many questions and absorbing the answers.

In a research paper published on Friday, the company said it had advanced that approach with a technique known as On-Policy Distillation (OPD) to train V4, drawing on the outputs of 10 separate "teacher" models. In practical terms, OPD allows a model to first generate its own responses before consulting multiple teachers to refine and correct them, accelerating the learning cycle.