The United States has launched a global diplomatic campaign alleging that Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, have engaged in unauthorized “distillation” of U.S. AI models — a technique used to train smaller models to mimic the outputs of larger, more advanced ones at a fraction of the development cost.
The accusations were outlined in a diplomatic cable sent to U.S. diplomatic posts worldwide on Friday, April 25, 2026, as reported by Reuters. The cable asked officials to raise “concerns over adversaries’ use and distillation of US AI models” with their foreign counterparts. A separate message was also sent to Beijing directly.
The warning follows DeepSeek’s launch of its V4 model, which the Chinese AI startup says is adapted for Huawei chip technology and performs comparably to Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT-5.4 on various tasks. The State Department cautioned, however, that distilled models appearing to match benchmark performance do not fully replicate the capabilities of the original systems they are derived from.
“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 reportedly stated. The document described its purpose as warning of risks from such models and laying “the groundwork for potential follow-up and outreach by the U.S. government.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington rejected the allegations, calling them “groundless” and characterizing them as “deliberate attacks on China’s development and progress in the AI industry.” DeepSeek did not respond to the latest controversy, though the company has previously stated that its V3 model was trained on data collected through web crawling rather than synthetic data generated by OpenAI.
The diplomatic cable had not been previously disclosed, though the White House had made similar allegations earlier in the week. The move signals a potential escalation in U.S. efforts to protect domestic AI intellectual property and could prompt broader international dialogue on AI development practices.
Source: mint – technology