ACCORDING to Associated Press, on 24 April 2026 the Trump administration vowed to crack down on foreign tech companies exploiting U.S. artificial intelligence models, singling out China. In a memo, Michael Kratsios, the president’s chief science and technology adviser, accused entities principally based in China of running deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill and exploit American AI capabilities.
The administration said it would work with American AI companies to identify such activities, build defenses and punish offenders, as the U.S. seeks to maintain global leadership in AI. The move comes as the House Foreign Affairs Committee backed a bill to create a process for identifying foreign actors that extract key technical features from closed‑source U.S.-owned models and sanction them.
The article notes previous accusations from OpenAI and Anthropic about Chinese laboratories distilling or illicitly extracting Claude’s capabilities, and it cites comments from Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institution on the difficulty of distinguishing legitimate data requests from unauthorized distillation.