The US State Department has launched a worldwide diplomatic campaign to warn nations about alleged intellectual property theft by Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) companies specifically naming the popular startup DeepSeek.
According to a diplomatic cable obtained by Reuters, US officials have been instructed to alert foreign counterparts about "distillation campaigns." This process involves foreign entities primarily based in China using thousands of automated accounts to "copy" the logic and technology of expensive American AI models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic.
What is 'Distillation'?
In simple terms, distillation is a shortcut. Instead of spending billions of dollars to build a "brain" for an AI from scratch, a firm uses the answers and data from an existing US model to train a smaller and cheaper version. While the resulting product may appear to perform well, US officials warn these models often lack the security protocols and reliability of the originals.
White House Steps Up Defense
Michael Kratsios, the White House Director of Science and Technology Policy, confirmed in a separate memo that the administration is working closely with US tech firms to combat these "industrial-scale" operations. The White House plans to share specific threat data with US AI companies, coordinate defensive strategies to block automated "jailbreak" attempts and also develop "best practices" to identify and stop technology leaks.
China Rejects Allegations
The Chinese Embassy in Washington has dismissed the claims as "groundless" and "unjustified suppression." A spokesperson stated that China's AI progress is the result of its own "dedication and innovation lab" efforts.
DeepSeek recently suffered a major outage and released a preview of its new "V4" model on Friday, designed to run on Huawei chips. The company has previously denied intentionally using synthetic data from US rivals, claiming its models are built using data collected through standard web crawling.
This diplomatic escalation comes at a sensitive time, as US President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Beijing in May for high-level talks with President Xi Jinping.
