U.S. State Department orders worldwide warning about alleged AI theft by DeepSeek and other Chinese companies

issued Saturday, April 25, 2026 · 3:45 p.m.

[WASHINGTON] The U.S. State Department has issued a global alert for widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek, to steal intellectual property from U.S. artificial intelligence laboratories, according to a diplomatic cable seen by Reuters.

The cable, dated Friday (April 24), was sent to diplomats and consulates around the world and instructs diplomatic staff to speak with their foreign counterparts about “concerns regarding the extraction and distillation of U.S. AI models by adversaries.”

“Another cancellation request and message was sent to the Chinese government seeking negotiations with China,” the document said.

Distillation is the process of using the output from larger, more expensive AI models to train smaller AI models as part of an effort to reduce the cost of training powerful new AI tools.

The White House made similar accusations this week, but the cables were not previously reported. The State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Reuters reported in February that OpenAI warned U.S. lawmakers that DeepSeek was targeting the ChatGPT maker and the nation’s leading AI companies in order to clone its models and use them for its own training.

China rejects accusations

The Chinese embassy in Washington reiterated its position on Friday that the accusations are baseless.

“Claims that Chinese companies are stealing U.S. AI intellectual property are baseless and a deliberate attack on the development and progress of China’s AI industry.”

DeepSeek, which surprised the world last year with its low-cost AI model, on Friday announced a preview of its long-awaited new model called V4, which is adapted to Huawei’s chip technology, underscoring China’s growing autonomy in this field.

DeepSeek also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has previously said its V3 model uses data that occurs naturally and is collected through web crawling, and does not intentionally use synthetic data generated by OpenAI.

Many Western countries and some Asian governments have banned the use of DeepSeek by their agencies and officials, citing data privacy concerns. Nevertheless, DeepSeek’s models have always been most popular on international platforms hosting open source models.

The State Department Cable said its purpose was to “warn the risks of utilizing AI models derived from U.S. proprietary AI models and lay the groundwork for potential follow-up and assistance by the U.S. government.”

He also mentioned Chinese AI companies Moonshot AI and MiniMax. Neither company responded to requests for comment.

“AI models developed from covert and unauthorized distillation campaigns allow foreign attackers to release products that appear to perform as well on some benchmarks at a fraction of the cost, but cannot reproduce the full performance of the original system,” the Telegram said.

It added that the campaign “intentionally removes security protocols from the resulting models and reinstates mechanisms that ensure that AI models are ideologically neutral and truth-seeking.”

The White House accusation and cable were released just weeks before US President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. Although the détente brokered last October had eased tensions, tensions in the long-running technology war between the rival superpowers are likely to escalate. Reuters