Khanna Demands AI Labs Reveal China's Weighty Secrets
US lawmakers are calling on top AI labs to disclose any attempts by China or other adversaries to steal their model weights. Rep. Ro Khanna, ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, sent letters to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and SpaceXAI in October 2026.
The letters seek information on any known efforts by China or other adversarial actors to illegally access or steal critical model weights. They also probe the cybersecurity protections in place to prevent such thefts.
Model weights are the numerical parameters that define a trained AI model, and stealing them can give an entity a significant advantage over others.
Khanna warned that a successful theft could undermine US leadership in artificial intelligence. He also raised concerns about distillation, a process where developers train new models using the outputs of existing systems, rather than stealing their weights directly.