The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable.
The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.”
Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new AI tool.
Photo: CN-STR / AFP
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that DeepSeek was targeting the ChatGPT maker and the nation’s leading AI companies to replicate their models and use them to train their own models, Reuters reported in February.
The Chinese embassy in Washington rejected the accusations, saying: “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.”
DeepSeek, whose low-cost AI model stunned the world last year, on Friday launched a preview of a new model, the V4, adapted for Huawei Technologies Co (華為) chip technology, underlining China’s growing autonomy in the sector.
Many Western and some Asian governments have banned their institutions and officials from using DeepSeek, citing data privacy concerns. Nevertheless, its models have consistently been among the most used on international platforms that host open-source models.
The US Department of State cable said its purpose was to “warn of the risks of utilizing AI models distilled from US proprietary AI models, and lay the groundwork for potential follow-up and outreach by the US government.”
The department also mentioned Chinese AI firms Moonshot AI Technology Co (月之暗面) and MiniMax Group Inc (稀宇科技).
“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,” the cable said.
The campaigns also “deliberately strip security protocols from the resulting models and undo mechanisms that ensure those AI models are ideologically neutral and truth-seeking,” it added.
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