The US State Department has instructed its diplomats worldwide to raise concerns about Chinese companies, including AI startup DeepSeek, allegedly stealing intellectual property from American AI laboratories, according to Reuters.
Diplomatic Cable Details
Citing a diplomatic cable, the report states that diplomats have been directed to discuss with their foreign counterparts "concerns over adversaries' extraction and distillation of U.S. A.I. models." Last week, the White House made similar accusations against Chinese companies, ordering US counterpoints to explore measures to prevent China from stealing US AI technology.
Content of the Cable
The cable, dated April 24, has been sent to diplomatic and consular posts globally. It specifically mentions companies such as DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. The cable notes that a separate message has 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.
Understanding AI Distillation
Distillation refers to training smaller AI systems using outputs from larger models to reduce costs. The State Department cable explains that its purpose is 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." The cable further warns 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."
Security Concerns
The cable also highlights that such campaigns "deliberately strip security protocols from the resulting models and undo mechanisms that ensure those AI models are ideologically neutral and truth-seeking."
China's Response
China has rejected these allegations. The Chinese Embassy in Washington stated, "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," as reported by Reuters.
DeepSeek has previously asserted that its models are trained using publicly available data and web-based sources.
