US vows to fight ‘industrial scale’ AI theft by Chinese firms
The Trump administration has unveiled plans to combat “industrial-scale campaigns” by Chinese-based entities to copy AI technology developed by US companies.
In a statement on Thursday, the assistant to the president for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael J. Kratsios, said the government has "information" indicating that foreign entities — primarily based in China — are deliberately targeting major US AI firms to distill their AI models.
"Models developed from surreptitious, unauthorized distillation campaigns like this do not replicate the full performance of the original. They do, however, enable foreign actors to release products that appear to perform comparably on select benchmarks at a fraction of the cost," Kratsios said.
The statement from the US government comes just two months after Claude-developer Anthropic accused three Chinese AI firms of engaging in distillation attacks on its AI models.
Meanwhile, the White House warned that models developed through these distillation campaigns allow actors to produce cheaper models that are stripped of security protocols, moving them away from being "neutral and truth-seeking."
According to data from Morph LLM, the current per-million-token pricing of frontier AI models such as Claude’s Opus 4.6 costs $5, while Chat GPT-5.4 Pro costs up to $30. China’s DeepSeek V3.2, described as a mid-tier model, costs only $0.26.
Tech investor Jason Calacanis said in a recent interview with the "All-In" podcast that he has been paying around $300 per day to use Anthropic AI agents to help run his businesses.
Source: White House OSTP 47
White House to coordinate with private AI sector
The White House OSTP said the Trump administration will seek to counter threats from foreign firms by sharing information with US companies about potentially large attacks, helping the private sector better coordinate against them, working with the private sector to build strong defenses, and exploring measures to "hold foreign actors accountable."
The White House OSTP said that the foreign companies have been using "tens of thousands of proxy accounts" to fly under the radar while "using jailbreaking techniques to expose proprietary information."
"These coordinated campaigns systematically extract capabilities from American AI models, exploiting American expertise and innovation," it said.
In Anthropic's case, the firm accused DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax in late February of generating "over 16 million exchanges" with its AI models combined across about 24,000 "fraudulent accounts."
The firm said the companies were trying to scrape Claude for capabilities such as agentic reasoning, coding and data analysis, rubric-based grading tasks, and computer vision.
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Jane Street asks US court to toss Terraform’s insider trading suit
Trading firm Jane Street has asked a US court to toss a lawsuit brought by the administrator of the bankrupt Terraform Labs, accusing the company of insider trading that worsened the collapse of the Terra ecosystem.
In a motion to dismiss filed in a Manhattan federal court on Thursday, Jane Street argued Terraform’s suit was an attempt “to extract cash from Jane Street to foot the bill for a fraud that Terraform itself perpetrated on the market.”
“Terraform now claims it was victimized by Jane Street’s trading,” it added. “The problem with this theory is that Terraform’s fraud scheme — in which Jane Street had no involvement — has already been prosecuted, adjudicated, and punished.”
Terraform’s court-appointed administrator, Todd Snyder, sued Jane Street, co-founder Robert Granieri, and employees Bryce Pratt and Michael Huang in February, accusing them of trading Terra tokens after receiving nonpublic information from “Terraform insiders.”
A highlighted excerpt of Jane Street’s motion argues it traded Terra-linked tokens based on market signals, not insider information. Source: CourtListener
Terraform collapsed in May 2022 after its algorithmic stablecoin, TerraUSD, rapidly lost its peg to the US dollar, sending the price of the highly interconnected LUNA token tumbling and wiping out $40 billion in value.
Jane Street argued in its motion that investors “saw the public signs of that collapse,” and it moved to “sell a deteriorating investment as the market was visibly collapsing.”
The firm claimed that the reasons for Terraform’s collapse had already been decided by a court, noting that its founder, Do Kwon, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud charges, for which he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Jane Street claimed that Terraform’s complaint was also “self-defeating,” as it had stated that Jane Street’s largest TerraUSD sale took place 10 minutes after “supposed material nonpublic information was visible to the market.”
It said Terraform also didn’t identify any material, nonpublic information Jane Street received when it alleged the trading firm sold more tokens in early May 2022 as Terraform transitioned to a new liquidity pool.
“Plaintiff pleads ‘on information and belief’ that Jane Street learned the timing of Terraform’s transition to a new liquidity pool through ‘back-channel communications,’ yet cannot identify a single communication disclosing that timing — despite extensive pre-suit discovery,” the motion said.
Jane Street asked the court to dismiss the suit with prejudice, meaning Terraform cannot bring the same lawsuit against it again.
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Crypto protocols pledge 43K ETH to restore rsETH backing
Decentralized finance protocols have banded together in an attempt to restore the backing of rsETH following the $293 million exploit of the Kelp restaking platform on Saturday, which has triggered a liquidity shock.
The amount pledged has now exceeded 43,500 Ether, worth over $101 million, which decentralized lending platform Aave has called the “DeFi United” relief effort. Crypto protocols involved include Lido DAO and the Golem Foundation, with the largest pledges coming from the EtherFi Foundation and Mantle at the time of writing.
“We believe ecosystem collaboration matters most in moments like this, and our priority is achieving the strongest possible available outcome for users, said Aave on Thursday.
“Multiple strong indicative commitments are now in place to join this effort toward restoring the backing of rsETH.”
Hackers stole 116,500 Kelp DAO Restaked ETH tokens on April 18 from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered bridge, then used them as collateral on Aave v3 to borrow wrapped Ether, resulting in about $195 million in bad debt on Aave, which has impacted the interconnected crypto lending market.
Source: Aave
DeFi United effort is ongoing
Ethereum layer-2 network Mantle has submitted a proposal to lend up to 30,000 Ether to Aave DAO to address the bad debt in return for yield.
The EtherFi Foundation has proposed a contribution of 5,000 Ether, while the Golem Foundation and Golem Factory are jointly offering 1,000 Ether toward the initiative.
Lido DAO has offered a one-time, capped contribution of up to 2,500 Lido Staked Ether (stETH) to a dedicated relief vehicle, conditional on others stepping in to fully fund the recovery package and close the deficit.
“The proposal is designed to reduce broader ecosystem spillover and support an orderly resolution for affected users,” they said.
Other DeFi protocols, including the cross-chain communication protocol LayerZero, layer-2 blockchain Ink Foundation and lending and borrowing platforms Tyrdo and Frax Finance, have also pledged undisclosed amounts of Ether to the cause.
Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov said he has also personally pledged 5,000 Ether and stated the platform is “working together with partners on formalizing more commitments.”
Source: Stani Kulechov
Some Ether already frozen from exploit
Earlier on Thursday, Aave announced that rsETH reserves were paused across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Mantle and Linea in an effort to recover more of the stolen tokens.
“This was done with the objective of recovering additional funds as the recovery plans progress. We will keep the community updated on the next steps as the efforts continue,” it said.
On Monday, a few days after the exploit, Arbitrum’s security council took emergency action to freeze 30,766 Ether held in a wallet linked to the Kelp exploit. However, blockchain analysts have reported that 75,700 of the tokens have already been laundered by the attacker.
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