The US State Department has asked its diplomats worldwide to raise concerns about what it says are efforts by Chinese companies, including AI startup DeepSeek, to steal intellectual property from American AI labs, reports Reuters. Citing diplomatic cable, the report says diplomats have been instructed to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of USAI models.” Last week, the White House made similar accusations against Chinese companies, directing US counterpoints to explore measures to stop China from stealing US AI technology.
What cable to US diplomats across the world says
The cable is dated April 24 and has been reportedly sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world. It referred to companies including DeepSeek and mentioned other firms such as Moonshot AI and MiniMax. The cable stated that a separate message had also been sent to Beijing to raise the issue with Chinese authorities. “A separate demarche request and message has been sent to Beijing for raising with China,” the document states.For those unaware, distillation refers to training smaller AI systems using outputs from larger models to reduce costs.The State Department cable said its purpose was to “warn of the risks of utilizing AI models distilled from US proprietary AI models, and lay the groundwork for potential follow-up and outreach by the US government.” The cable said that “AI models developed from surreptitious, unauthorized distillation campaigns enable foreign actors to release products that appear to perform comparably on select benchmarks at a fraction of the cost but do not replicate the full performance of the original system.” It further added that the campaigns also “deliberately strip security protocols from the resulting models and undo mechanisms that ensure those AI models are ideologically neutral and truth-seeking.“
China rejects allegations
China has denied the claims. The Chinese Embassy in Washington said: “The allegations that Chinese entities are stealing American AI intellectual property are groundless and are deliberate attacks on China’s development and progress in the AI industry,” according to Reuters.DeepSeek has previously said its models are trained using publicly available data and web-based sources.
