The United States has raised its concerns with China about attacks against a popular activist website that carried a petition to release detained artist Ai Weiwei, according to a letter released Tuesday.

Change.org, a US-based online activist network, has faced disruptions since April when museums posted a call for Ai's release that has since been signed by more than 140,000 people.

Website organizers said the attacks came from China.

In a letter to a US lawmaker who voiced concern, the State Department said the head of its democracy bureau, Dan Baer, "raised the case of Change.org directly" with China's foreign ministry during talks on human rights in late April.

"The Department will continue to press China on the importance of an open and unrestricted Internet," said the letter to Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, as released by Change.org

The petition, first launched by New York's Guggenheim Museum, urged the release of Ai and voiced "disappointment in China's reluctance to live up to its promise to nurture creativity and independent thought, the keys to 'soft power' and cultural influence."

Ai, a world-renowned artist, was taken into custody on April 3 as he tried to fly from Beijing to Hong Kong. Authorities later said that his firm had been accused of tax evasion.

Ai has long been outspoken in his social commentary and had been begrudgingly tolerated. But in recent months, China has launched a major crackdown on dissent, apparently amid concern over pro-democracy protests in the Middle East.

Ai is known for his "Sunflower Seeds," an exhibition of millions of seemingly identical but in fact unique mini-sculptures, at the Tate Modern. He also helped design the Bird's Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics.

In one of his more poignant works, a 2009 exhibition in Munich featured thousands of backpacks, a reminder of the children killed in the Sichuan earthquake due to what many parents said was shoddy construction.

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