The US State Department sent a message to all its embassies around the world: “This is theft”

The US State Department has launched a global campaign to draw attention to what it sees as widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including AI startup DeepSeek, to steal intellectual property from US artificial intelligence labs, according to a diplomatic cable seen by Reuters.

The telegram, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular missions around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to discuss with their foreign counterparts “concerns about the extraction and distillation of American AI designs by adversaries.”

“A separate request and message of protest has been sent to Beijing for discussion with China,” the document said.

This is not the first accusation of “distillation” against DeepSeek

Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using the results of larger and more expensive ones as part of efforts to reduce the cost of training a powerful new artificial intelligence tool.

This week, the White House made similar accusations.

OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that DeepSeek is targeting ChatGPT and the country's leading AI companies to copy their models and use them for its own development, Reuters wrote in February.

China: “Unfounded accusations”

China's embassy in Washington reiterated its position on Friday that the allegations are baseless.

“Allegations that Chinese entities are stealing US intellectual property in the field of AI are baseless and are 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 wowed the world last year, on Friday released a preview of a highly-anticipated new model, dubbed the V4, tailored for Huawei's chip technology, underscoring China's growing autonomy in the sector.

In the past, the company has said that its V3 model used naturally occurring data collected through web crawling and did not intentionally use synthetic data generated by OpenAI.

What the State Department accuses

The State Department's telegram stated that its purpose was to “warn about the risks of using AI models distilled from US AI models and lay the groundwork for potential prosecution and outreach by the US government.”

It also mentioned Chinese AI firms Moonshot and MiniMax.

The Telegram states that “AI models developed from covert and unauthorized mining campaigns allow foreign actors to release products that appear to perform comparable to certain benchmarks at a fraction of the cost, but do not reproduce the full performance of the original system.”

It also charges that these mining campaigns “deliberately remove security protocols from the resulting models and override the mechanisms that ensure those AI models are ideologically neutral and truth-seeking.”

Photo: Vladyslav Musiienko | Dreamstime.com