Huizenga Filed Bill to Sanction DeepSeek Under 1977 Law

If the Deterring American AI Model Theft Act passes, companies like DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax could face placement on the Commerce Department’s Entity List or sanctions under a 1977 emergency powers law.

Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., introduced legislation targeting Chinese and Russian companies using “query-and-copy” techniques against American AI models. The bill would direct the government to identify offenders and consider two enforcement routes: the Commerce blacklist and presidential emergency economic powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.

The evidence isn’t thin. Anthropic said in February that Chinese AI startups created 24,000 fraudulent accounts to improperly train their own models using Anthropic’s technology. “These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication,” the company wrote. Google’s Threat Intelligence Group separately disclosed a growing incidence of distillation attacks and said it disrupted model extraction campaigns last year from researchers and companies worldwide.

Huizenga called model extraction attacks “the latest frontier of Chinese economic coercion and theft of US intellectual property.” If it clears committee, it’ll give Commerce and the White House a directed mandate to pursue sanctions under IEEPA. Bloomberg frames it as Congress’ first major step in addressing concerns from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic about cheap, less-safe AI copies pulling away customers.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee takes up the bill next week.

— James Okafor