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26-04-2026
WASHINGTON: The White House on Thursday accused China of stealing US artificial intelligence labs’ intellectual property on an industrial scale in a memo that threatens to strain relations ahead of a summit between US and Chinese leaders next month.
“The US government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distil US frontier AI systems,” Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a memo shared on social media on Thursday and first reported by the Financial Times.
“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,” he added.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington said it opposes “the baseless allegations,” adding that Beijing “attaches great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights.”
The memo, released just weeks before US President Donald Trump is set to visit Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, promises to raise tensions in a long-running tech war between the rival superpowers, which had been lowered by a detente brokered last October.
It also raises questions about whether Washington will allow Nvidia’s powerful AI chips to be shipped to China. The Trump administration gave a green light to the sales in January, with conditions. On Wednesday, however, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick indicated that no shipments had yet been made.
Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using the output of larger ones as part of an effort to lower the costs of training a powerful new AI tool.
The memo, addressed to government agencies, says the administration will share information with American AI companies about the distillation efforts, and “explore a range of measures to hold foreign actors accountable” for the campaigns.
Donald Trump will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in May during his first visit to China in eight years, a closely watched trip postponed due to the Iran war.
Trump’s effort to reschedule the trip reflected the Republican president’s eagerness to project confidence in a challenging Middle East war and simultaneously to manage a tense relationship between the world’s biggest economies.
Initially slated to travel next week, Trump will now visit Beijing on May 14 and 15, he said in a Truth Social post on Wednesday. Trump added that he would host Xi for a reciprocal visit in Washington later this year.
“Our Representatives are finalizing preparations for these Historic Visits,” Trump said. “I look very much forward to spending time with President Xi in what will be, I am sure, a Monumental Event.”
China’s embassy said it had no information to provide on the announcement of the visit. Beijing normally does not detail Xi’s schedule more than a few days in advance.
The long-scheduled trip and Washington’s broader effort to reset relations in the Asia Pacific region have been repeatedly overtaken by events.
In February, the Supreme Court curtailed the US president’s power to impose tariffs, a source of leverage for Trump in negotiations with the US’ third-biggest trading partner. Later that month, Trump’s joint military operation with Israel against Iran introduced a new point of tension with Beijing, Tehran’s main oil buyer.
Trump’s last trip to China, in 2017, was the most recent by a US president. Trump’s visit in May will be the leaders’ first in-person talks since an October meeting in South Korea, where they agreed on a trade truce. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
