You’re Invited: AI Model Piracy, Virtual Panel

The Emerging Threat of Distillation & Model Weight Theft

On Wednesday, March 5, ARI will host a virtual panel, AI Model Piracy: The Emerging Threat of Distillation & Model Weight Theft, with experts from across civil society, think tanks, and academia. The expert panel will discuss AI model weight theft, distillation, and what the government and private sector can do to prevent adversaries from exploiting closed US AI models to build their own frontier AI. Following the release of DeepSeek’s models earlier this year and revelations that the company likely used distillation to train their AI, this panel will focus on the threat that model weight theft poses to U.S. leadership in AI development.

AI Model Piracy: The Emerging Threat of Distillation & Model Weight Theft
Virtual Panel
Time: 2:00PM – 3:00PM ET
Date: Wednesday, March 5, 2025
RSVP here

Next week’s panel includes experts from across the AI policy community, including:

• Eric Gastfriend, Executive Director, Americans for Responsible Innovation (moderator)
• Janet Egan, Senior Fellow, Technology and National Security Program, CNAS
• Lennart Heim, Associate Information Scientist; Professor of Policy Analysis, Pardee RAND Graduate School
• Stephen Casper, MIT PhD Student; UK AISI Research Resident

This panel is open to the press and the public. The event will include a discussion with expert panelists followed by Q&A with live questions from attendees. For questions on the upcoming virtual event, please contact Chris MacKenzie at chris@ari.us.

###

Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to policy advocacy in the public interest, focused on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). Learn more at ARI.us.