The US State Department has ordered a global diplomatic offensive to draw attention to what it describes as widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including the startup DeepSeek, to steal the intellectual property of American artificial intelligence laboratories, according to a diplomatic cable seen by Reuters.
The document, dated Friday and addressed to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to raise with their foreign counterparts ‘concerns about the extraction and distillation of American AI models by adversaries.’
‘A demarche and a separate message were sent to Beijing to be communicated to China,’ the document specifies.
Distillation is the process of producing smaller AI models using the results of larger and more expensive models, in order to reduce the costs of developing a new powerful AI tool.
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 American lawmakers that DeepSeek was targeting the creator of ChatGPT and the leading AI companies in the country to replicate their models and use them for its own training, Reuters reported in February.
THE CHINA REFUTES ACCUSATIONS
The Chinese Embassy in Washington reiterated its position on Friday, stating that these accusations are unfounded.
‘The allegations that Chinese entities are stealing American intellectual property in AI are baseless and deliberate attacks on China’s development and progress in the AI industry,’ it said in a statement sent to Reuters.
DeepSeek, whose low-cost AI model stunned the world last year, launched a preliminary version of a highly anticipated new model, called V4, adapted to Huawei’s chip technology on Friday, highlighting China’s increasing 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 naturally collected data from web scraping and did not intentionally use synthetic data generated by OpenAI.
Many Western governments and some Asian countries have banned their institutions and officials from using DeepSeek, citing concerns about data privacy. 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 aim is to ‘warn against the risks associated with the use of distilled AI models from American proprietary models, and to pave the way for potential follow-up actions by the US government.’
It also mentions Chinese AI firms Moonshot AI and MiniMax. Neither of the two companies 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 some reference tests for a fraction of the cost, without replicating the full performance of the original system.’
It adds that these campaigns ‘deliberately strip the security protocols of resulting models and negate mechanisms ensuring that these AI models are ideologically neutral and oriented towards truth-seeking.’
The accusations from the White House and this cable come just weeks before the planned visit of US President Donald Trump to Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. They could reignite tensions in a long-standing technological war between the two rival superpowers, tensions that had eased thanks to a negotiated détente last October.
