Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing industries, driving innovation, and reshaping the global economy at an unprecedented pace. However, with such advancements comes heightened risk of exploitation — particularly involving American intellectual property. Patents, trade secrets, and proprietary AI capabilities increasingly face threats from foreign intelligence activities, coordinated data extraction, and unfair technology transfer practices, jeopardizing not only private enterprises but also national security. At the same time, due to the ongoing U.S.–Israel conflict involving Iran, global strategic attention has become heavily concentrated on the Middle East. As we observe, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Russian Federation have not directly intervened in support of Iran. While definitive conclusions cannot yet be drawn, one reasonable possibility is that strategic competitors may benefit when U.S. federal law enforcement, military, and intelligence communities focus primarily on a single theater of conflict. Such concentration could create opportunities for parallel geopolitical threats — including potential efforts to appropriate or replicate U.S. AI research. Advanced AI capabilities are themselves critical to modern defense operations, including those relevant to conflicts abroad. For this reason, this petition calls on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) to ensure sustained allocation of resources to continuously monitor and investigate whether U.S. AI research has been unlawfully acquired or exploited, even amid shifting global crises.

Recent developments highlight the urgency of this challenge. On February 23, 2026, Anthropic publicly alleged that three Chinese AI laboratories — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — used approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts to generate millions of interactions with Anthropic’s Claude models.

According to reporting by VentureBeat, the activity was characterized as a coordinated attempt to extract model capabilities for use in competing AI systems through large-scale distillation techniques.

While these allegations remain subject to investigation and legal interpretation, the incident underscores growing concerns about the protection of advanced AI systems and the evolving methods used to capture their capabilities.

Historically, intellectual property theft has resulted in billions of dollars in losses for American companies.
A report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) estimated that stolen IP costs the U.S. economy between $225 billion and $600 billion annually.

As AI technologies advance, they become prime targets for unauthorized replication, data extraction, and reverse-engineering strategies that may bypass traditional IP safeguards.

The FBI and the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) play critical roles in safeguarding our nation’s assets. Yet as AI evolves, so must our vigilance and response strategies. We urge these agencies to prioritize investigations into AI-related intellectual property risks, including large-scale model extraction, proxy-based access abuse, and coordinated efforts to replicate proprietary AI capabilities.

By doing so, we can deter potential violations, ensure fair trade practices, and protect the fruits of American ingenuity. We propose:
    • Increased inter-agency collaboration on AI security and IP enforcement
    • Expanded public-private partnerships with AI developers and cloud providers
    • Strategic use of AI tools to detect unauthorized model extraction and data harvesting
    • Clear legal frameworks addressing large-scale AI distillation and misuse of model outputs
    • Stronger penalties and enforcement mechanisms against coordinated IP exploitation

The future of our economy and technological leadership depends on the actions we take today. Let us secure America’s role as a global leader in innovation by strengthening protections for AI-related intellectual property.
Sign this petition to urge the FBI and DOJ to prioritize enforcement against AI-related intellectual property exploitation and to modernize safeguards for the age of advanced artificial intelligence.