The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has issued a memorandum titled “Adversarial Distillation of American AI Models” (NSTM-4), signed by Michael Kratsios, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the OSTP, and addressed to the Heads of all Executive Departments and Agencies. The memorandum states that the US government has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are conducting coordinated, industrial-scale campaigns to steal American frontier AI systems through distillation attacks — a technique that involves training a smaller AI model by systematically harvesting the outputs of a larger, more advanced one. These campaigns reportedly use tens of thousands of proxy accounts and jailbreaking techniques to evade detection, and while the resulting models may not fully replicate the originals, they can appear to perform comparably on select benchmarks at a fraction of the development cost. The memorandum also warns that such attacks can be used to deliberately strip security safeguards from AI models, removing controls designed to keep them ideologically neutral and truth-seeking. In response, the administration stated it will share information with US AI companies about the tactics and actors involved, work with private industry to develop defenses against large-scale distillation campaigns, and explore measures to hold foreign actors accountable, while noting that lawful distillation for open-source development remains a legitimate practice.
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