Key Points:
- US State Department launches global push against Chinese AI IP theft.
- Accusations target DeepSeek for “distillation” of US AI models.
- Distillation involves training smaller AI models from larger, proprietary ones.
- OpenAI warned US lawmakers about DeepSeek targeting its models.
The U.S. State Department has launched a global campaign to highlight what it calls widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including AI startup DeepSeek, to steal intellectual property from U.S. artificial intelligence labs. This information comes from a diplomatic cable reviewed .
The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic posts worldwide, tells diplomatic staff to discuss “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of U.S. A.I. models” with their foreign counterparts. “A separate request and message has been sent to Beijing for raising with China,” the document also states, indicating direct communication with the Chinese government.
Distillation is a process where smaller AI models are trained using the output from larger, more expensive ones. This helps reduce the cost of creating a powerful new AI tool. Earlier this week, the White House made similar accusations, but this specific cable had not been reported before. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI has warned U.S. lawmakers that DeepSeek was targeting the ChatGPT maker and other leading U.S. AI companies to copy their models and use them for its own training. DeepSeek, whose low-cost AI model surprised the world last year, launched a preview of a highly anticipated new model, V4, on Friday. This new model is adapted for Huawei chip technology, highlighting China’s increasing independence in the sector.
DeepSeek also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the past, it has stated that its V3 model used naturally occurring data collected through web crawling and that it had not intentionally used synthetic data generated by OpenAI.
Many Western and some Asian governments have banned their institutions and officials from using DeepSeek, citing worries about data privacy. Despite this, DeepSeek’s models are consistently among the most used on international platforms that host open-source models.
The State Department cable said its purpose was to “warn of the risks of utilizing AI models distilled from U.S. proprietary AI models, and lay the groundwork for potential follow-up and outreach by the U.S. government.” It also mentioned Chinese AI firms Moonshot AI and MiniMax. Neither company immediately responded to a request for comment.
The cable explained that “AI models developed from secret, 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 added that these campaigns also “deliberately strip security protocols from the resulting models and undo mechanisms that ensure those AI models are ideologically neutral and truth-seeking.”
These accusations from the White House and the State Department come just weeks before U.S. President Donald Trump is set to visit Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. They could increase tensions in the long-running tech war between the two superpowers, which had calmed down after a truce in October.
