The Trump administration on Thursday accused China-backed actors of running "deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns" to distill and copy American frontier AI models . Why it matters: The accusation pushes the U.S.-China AI rivalry into more confrontational territory — and could complicate President Trump's upcoming visit to Beijing. Driving the news: Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, sent a memo Thursday to federal agency heads accusing mostly China-based actors of using proxy accounts to evade detection and jailbreak models to "expose proprietary information" and "extract capabilities from American AI models." Distillation attacks involve querying proprietary models, like Claude or Gemini, millions of times via APIs to build datasets that replicate how the systems behave. Kratsios said these campaigns enable foreign actors to release models that appear to match U.S. AI capabilities at a fraction of the cost.…