Ro Khanna asks top AI labs to disclose Chinese attempts to steal model weights

Congress wants to know whether America’s most valuable AI secrets have already walked out the door. Rep. Ro Khanna has asked the country’s leading AI labs to report any known attempts by China or other adversaries to steal their model weights. What Khanna is asking for On October 1, 2026, Khanna sent letters to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceXAI. He is the ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. The letters seek detailed 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 the companies have in place to stop that from happening. Model weights are the numerical parameters that define a trained AI model. Steal the file, and you skip the school entirely. Khanna warned that a successful theft could undermine US leadership in artificial intelligence. Theft could occur “with the stroke of a keyboard,” Khanna said. Distillation: the quieter problem Khanna’s letter does not stop at outright theft. He also flagged distillation as a significant concern. Distillatio...