The US State Department has sent a diplomatic cable to every embassy and consulate worldwide. The message: China is systematically stealing American AI models — and the world needs to know.
What happened
Reuters obtained the cable, dated April 25. It instructs all diplomatic posts to speak with their foreign counterparts about ‘concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of U.S. AI models.’ The companies named: DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — all Chinese AI firms.
Distillation means training smaller, cheaper models using the outputs of larger, more expensive ones. The result looks comparably good on select benchmarks but doesn’t replicate the full system’s performance. According to the cable, these campaigns also ‘deliberately strip security protocols from the resulting models and undo mechanisms that ensure those AI models are ideologically neutral and truth-seeking.‘
The context
This warning arrives just weeks before a planned visit by US President Trump to China’s Xi Jinping in Beijing — and threatens to unravel the detente brokered between the tech superpowers last October.
OpenAI had already warned US lawmakers in February that DeepSeek was specifically targeting ChatGPT and other leading US companies to replicate their models. The cable now makes this an official government position.
Meanwhile, DeepSeek released a preview of its new V4 model on Friday — optimized for Huawei chip technology. That underlines China’s growing autonomy in AI development, independent of Western hardware.
What this means
The Chinese Embassy in Washington has rejected the accusations, citing Beijing’s ‘great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights.’
But the move signals a clear escalation. This isn’t just about chip export restrictions and trade barriers anymore. When the State Department sends diplomatic cables worldwide, that’s a new level entirely.
For European AI users and developers, there’s an interesting question here: how sovereign do AI systems need to be when even the two largest AI nations are accusing each other of open technology theft? The just-announced Cohere-Aleph Alpha merger gains even more significance in this light.
Sources: CNBC/Reuters: U.S. State Department orders global warning about alleged China AI thefts