The US Department of State has launched a global diplomatic push to draw attention to what it describes as widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including the startup DeepSeek, to steal intellectual property from American artificial intelligence labs, according to a diplomatic cable seen by Reuters.
The document, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts worldwide, instructs diplomatic staff to discuss with foreign counterparts ‘concerns about the extraction and distillation of American AI models by adversaries.’
‘Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using results from larger and more expensive models, in order to reduce the costs of developing a new effective AI tool.’
Earlier this week, the White House made similar accusations, but the existence of this diplomatic cable had not been reported until now. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI warned US lawmakers that DeepSeek was targeting the creator of ChatGPT and leading AI companies in the country to replicate their models and use them for its own training, as reported by Reuters in February.
CHINA REJECTS ACCUSATIONS
The Chinese embassy in Washington reaffirmed its position on Friday, stating that these accusations are unfounded.
‘The allegations that Chinese entities are stealing American intellectual property in AI are unfounded and deliberate attacks on China’s development and progress in the AI industry,’ it said in a statement to Reuters.
DeepSeek, whose low-cost AI model shocked the world last year, unveiled a preliminary version of a highly anticipated new model, V4, tailored to Huawei chip technology on Friday, highlighting China’s growing autonomy in the sector.
DeepSeek also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the past, the company claimed that its V3 model used data naturally collected through web crawling and did not intentionally use synthetic data generated by OpenAI.
Several Western governments and some Asian countries have banned their institutions and officials from using DeepSeek, citing data privacy concerns. However, DeepSeek’s models are regularly among the most used on international platforms hosting open-source models.
The State Department’s cable specifies that its goal is to ‘warn against the risks associated with the use of distilled AI models from American proprietary models, and to lay the groundwork for possible follow-up actions by the US government.’
It also mentions Chinese AI firms Moonshot AI and MiniMax. Neither company immediately responded to a request for comment.
The document states that ‘AI models developed from clandestine and unauthorized distillation campaigns allow foreign actors to market products that appear to offer comparable performance on certain benchmark tests at a fraction of the cost, without replicating the full performance of the original system.’
It adds that these campaigns ‘deliberately remove the security protocols of the resulting models and override mechanisms ensuring that these AI models are ideologically neutral and oriented towards the search for truth.’
The White House’s accusations and this diplomatic cable come just weeks before the scheduled visit of US President Donald Trump to Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. They could reignite tensions in a longstanding technological war between the two rival superpowers, tensions that had been eased through negotiations in October last year.
