Adversarial Distillation of American AI Models (NSTM-4)

This April 23, 2026 memorandum from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) addresses the threat of industrial-scale adversarial distillation of U.S. frontier AI models by foreign entities, principally based in China. The document states that these campaigns leverage tens of thousands of proxy accounts and jailbreaking techniques to systematically extract capabilities from American AI models at a fraction of the cost, enabling foreign actors to release models that appear comparable on benchmarks while deliberately stripping security protocols and mechanisms that ensure models are "ideologically neutral and truth-seeking." While the U.S. supports legitimate AI distillation (producing smaller, lighter-weight models from advanced systems), the administration announces four actions: sharing threat information with U.S. AI companies, enabling private sector coordination, developing best practices to identify and mitigate industrial-scale distillation, and exploring measures to hold foreign actors accountable. The memorandum emphasizes that "there is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the innovations of American industry." 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/NSTM-4.pdf

(we all know, they just made official)

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