"If we are serious about preventing adversaries from appropriating the capabilities of U.S. frontier models, we must be equally serious about restricting their access to the computational infrastructure that enables adversarial distillation," Eric Gastfriend, executive director of Americans for Responsible Innovation, wrote in a letter to White House officials.
ARI urges OSTP director Michael Kratsios to block chip exports
Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) formally requested that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director Michael Kratsios bar exports of advanced AI chips to China, according to a letter sent Monday and first seen by Nextgov/FCW. ARI told the OSTP that limiting access to cutting‑edge processors is necessary to prevent Beijing from using U.S. AI systems to replicate frontier models via so‑called distillation campaigns.
OSTP warning: “deliberate, industrial‑scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems”
Last Thursday, OSTP publicly accused China and other foreign nations of engaging in “deliberate, industrial‑scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems,” and said the administration will take steps to safeguard domestic AI systems. The term “distillation” in this context refers to sending large volumes of queries to an AI model in order to train a competing version built from the model’s outputs.
Nvidia H200 sales remain in limbo; Commerce says none have reached China
The debate over export controls is colliding with commercial reality. Hardware such as Nvidia’s H200 provides the computational horsepower required both to train large models and to conduct high‑volume querying for distillation campaigns. The Trump administration approved limited H200 sales earlier this year, but Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said last week that “we have not sold them chips as of yet” and that Beijing has not allowed domestic firms to purchase the hardware. Those H200 approvals have not yet translated into shipments to China.
Documented distillation attempts and model access incidents
Government warnings and policy pushback are not theoretical. Anthropic in February accused three Chinese‑based companies — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax — of overwhelming its Claude model with 16 million exchanges from roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts. That same month OpenAI told members of the House China Select Committee it had seen evidence “indicative of ongoing attempts by DeepSeek to distill frontier models of OpenAI and other US frontier labs, including through new, obfuscated methods.”
Separately, Bloomberg News reported that a small group of unauthorized users accessed Anthropic’s new Mythos AI model; Anthropic had previously said that Mythos has identified thousands of vulnerabilities and is capable of enabling dangerous cyberattacks. Those incidents underpin ARI’s central claim: advanced chips are a limiting factor for high‑scale model replication, and restricting chip access could slow, though not stop, adversarial efforts.
Views from practitioners and what this means for policymakers, technologists, and vendors
- Policymakers and regulators: ARI has urged concrete export restrictions to deny adversaries the computational infrastructure for distillation. The OSTP warning signals the administration is treating distillation as an actionable national‑security concern; Nextgov/FCW has asked OSTP and the Commerce Department for comment on ARI’s proposal and the administration’s plans.
- Technologists and security teams: Peter Kant, CEO of Enabled Intelligence, described nation‑state AI competition as “very, very real” and said distillation represents “a whole new attack vector and domain that will only increase over time.” Lonny Anderson, president of BlueVoyant Government Solutions, warned that the pace and drama of these efforts will accelerate.
- Vendors and procurement leaders: The status of shipments — notably the lack of actual H200 deliveries to China so far, per Commerce Secretary Lutnick — leaves vendors and buyers in an uncertain position. ARI’s position ties hardware access directly to capability replication, which places export controls and licensing decisions at the center of commercial planning.
The debate now centers on how far export controls should go and whether restricting advanced chips will materially slow distillation campaigns without unintended blowback. ARI’s letter treats chip access as the chokepoint; OSTP’s public warning raises the political stakes. For its part, Nextgov/FCW has sought comment from OSTP and the Commerce Department, and Commerce has said shipments have not yet reached China.
Whether tighter export rules, operational countermeasures by model owners, or a combination of both will form the next administration response remains to be seen — but the record in recent months shows both large‑scale distillation attempts and model access incidents have already moved the debate from abstract risk to concrete policy pressure.
