WASHINGTON — White House chief science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios announced in a Thursday memo that the Trump administration will crack down on foreign tech companies' exploitation of U.S. artificial intelligence models. The administration is singling out China at a time when the country is narrowing the gap with the U.S. in the AI race.

Kratsios accused foreign entities principally based in China of engaging in industrial-scale campaigns to distill capabilities from leading U.S. AI systems and exploit American expertise and innovation. The administration said it will work with American AI companies to identify exploitation activities, build defenses, and find ways to punish offenders.

The White House said the U.S. must prevail in artificial intelligence to set global standards and reap economic and military benefits. A recent report from Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI found that the U.S.-China gap in performance of top AI models has effectively closed.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee offered unanimous, bipartisan support for a bill to set up a process to identify foreign actors that extract key technical features of closed-source, U.S.-owned AI models and to punish them with measures including sanctions. Rep. Bill Huizenga said, "Model extraction attacks are the latest frontier of Chinese economic coercion and theft of U.S. intellectual property." He added, "American AI models are demonstrating transformative cyber capabilities, and it is critical we prevent China from stealing these technological advancements."

Last year, the Chinese start-up DeepSeek released a large language model that could compete with U.S. AI giants at a fraction of the cost. In February, Anthropic accused DeepSeek and two other China-based AI laboratories of engaging in campaigns to "illicitly extract Claude's capabilities to improve their own models" using the distillation technique, which involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.

Anysphere, a San Francisco-based startup and maker of the coding tool Cursor, acknowledged that its latest product was based on an open-source model made by Chinese company Moonshot AI, maker of the chatbot Kimi. Kyle Chan, a fellow at The Brookings Institution and an expert on China's technology development, said enforcement would be difficult.

"It will be like looking for needles in an enormous haystack to separate unauthorized distillation from the vast volume of legitimate requests for data," Chan said. He said information sharing and coordination among U.S. AI labs with federal government facilitation could help anti-distillation efforts, and added that President Donald Trump may be reluctant to strain relations with Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of a planned mid-May state visit to Beijing.

China's embassy in Washington said it opposed "the unjustified suppression of Chinese companies by the U.S." Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said, "China has always been committed to promoting scientific and technological progress through cooperation and healthy competition. China attaches great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights."