A new bipartisan House bill would charge the federal government with developing formal guidance for defending AI models against distillation attacks.
The AI Cyber Defense Act, shared exclusively with CyberScoop ahead of release, is sponsored by Reps. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C., and George Whitesides, D-Calif. It would direct the National Institute for Standards and Technology to develop voluntary industry standards and best practices for preventing distillation attacks from foreign entities from four countries: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
In an interview, Harrigan told CyberScoop it is “incredibly expensive” for the U.S. AI industry to maintain its six-to-12 month lead over other countries, and distillation attacks give other parties an incentive to copy other models while keeping their own spending low.
He said he believes countries such as China
He said he believes countries such as China are making a strategic choice to hold back on full investment of their own AI industry, instead betting they can drift behind American companies as they perform the arduous and expensive research and development to advance the field.
“One of my concerns is that our adversaries just see it as much more beneficial and productive for them as this [U.S. industry] engine burns,” said Harrigan. “Where they actually just see it as more beneficial for themselves in the short term, to hang six to 12 months behind the United States, let us burn really hot and for 5 to 10% of the spend, they can just distill and steal, and they can do that up to until the point where our market kind of falters. At which point they can turn it into high gear, having not expended those resources yet in the past, and actually leapfrog us.”
As part of that mission, NIST will first have to define what a distillation attack is, and separate it from much of the sharing and collaboration between open-weight and open-
Distillation attacks happen when one AI model
Distillation attacks happen when one AI model is trained on the output data and reasoning of another, usually more powerful or advanced, model. The U.S. government, along with AI companies Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, has accused Chinese companies like Moonshot AI, DeepSeek and Alibaba, of carrying out “systematic” campaigns to distill and copy U.S. commercial models.
According to AI and cybersecurity experts, these campaigns involve the use of hundreds of burner and resold accounts and false identities to bypass geographic restrictions to access U.S. frontier models, and involve thousands, sometimes millions of prompts meant to extract valuable outputs and capabilities that can be used to train a foreign model.
Meanwhile, U.S. AI companies themselves face multiple ongoing lawsuits from media organizations, creators, artists and other laborers, who allege that commercial U.S. models were originally trained on their works without any compensation or permission.
AI is advancing at a breakneck pace,
“AI is advancing at a breakneck pace, and every month we keep China and other adversaries from stealing our progress is a month we gain to build the safeguards this technology needs,” Rep. Whitesides said in a statement to CyberScoop.
The bill would also establish an “AI Cybersecurity Roundtable” at NIST composed of governments and AI industry stakeholders that would work to develop voluntary standards for defensive use of AI in cybersecurity in critical infrastructure.
Harrigan said he envisions the roundtable as including frontier AI companies including software and hardware security experts, who can add independent third-party voices in discussions on the best way to defend IT assets in critical infrastructure and other industries. A place “where you can go and pick an off-the-shelf set of standards that says these are the best practices as we know them all today, given the current state of technology development and the threats that are out there.”
The bill defines “entities of concern” as any foreign person or organization headquartered in one of the four listed countries of concern (Russia, China, Iran and North Korea), or one operating under the direction of a company based in those countries. The director of NIST would also have the ability to designate specific individuals or organizations as entities of concern.
