U.S. Congressman Bill Huizenga: Counteractive Distillation Needs to be Curbed with Entity List and Sanctions

U.S. House Republican Bill Huizenga has proposed the "Countering U.S. AI Model Theft Act," which calls for the government to identify entities in China and Russia using "query replication" (counteractive distillation) to steal capabilities from U.S. AI models. The bill authorizes the Department of Commerce to add these entities to the entity list or invoke the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sanctions. The bill is co-sponsored by John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Special Committee on China, and is expected to be reviewed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee next week.

Earlier this year, OpenAI disclosed to the committee that DeepSeek had conducted large-scale queries to train its own model using ChatGPT and continued to circumvent restrictions after countermeasures were implemented; Google and Anthropic also released reports confirming similar anomalous access. The committee's accompanying report names DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, identifying circumvention tools and intermediaries, and recommends lawsuits by the Department of Justice and sanctions by the Department of Commerce.

Huizenga emphasized in a statement, "U.S. AI models are demonstrating transformative network capabilities, and preventing theft by China is crucial," specifically mentioning Anthropic's Mythos. The three companies have shared information to detect distillation activities, and this bill aims to elevate private collaboration to government enforcement.

Source: Public Information