‘Extraction and distillation’: US State Department upgrades AI theft accusations to target China’s Deepseek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax

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Deepseek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax have all been accused

DeepSeek
(Image credit: Getty Images)
  • US State Department says China is stealing US intellectual property
  • US AI models are being 'distilled' to produce cheaper models for China
  • Deepseek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax accused of alleged theft

The US State Department has accused Chinese AI companies of stealing the intellectual property of US artificial intelligence models.

The White House recently accused China of ‘systematically’ distilling and extracting US AI models, but is now directly accusing Chinese companies.

A new cable issued a global warning and directly accused Chinese AI companies such as Deepseek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax of distilling US AI models to produce their own models.

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Stealing intellectual property

The State Department says the cable was issued to “warn of the risks of utilizing AI models distilled from U.S. proprietary AI models, and lay the groundwork for potential follow-up and outreach by the U.S. government.”

AI models require large amounts of high quality data to train, but it is possible to ‘distill’ a smaller model from a large one. The smaller model is trained using the outputs of the larger model, significantly reducing the cost of its production.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington previously denied the accusations, stating that Beijing “attaches great importance to the protection of intellectual property rights.”

Chinese companies have released a number of powerful, low-cost AI models that have disrupted the AI market - most notably the release of Deepseek’s DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 models that rivalled their ChatGPT counterparts but with a significant reduction in cost and computing power.

Chinese AI companies Moonshot AI and MiniMax were also mentioned in the cable, which requests diplomatic staff around the world raise “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of U.S. A.I. models,” with their foreign counterparts.

US President Donald Trump is due to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in May 2026, and the latest accusations will likely raise tensions between the two leaders.

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Benedict Collins
Benedict Collins
Senior Writer, Security

Benedict is a Senior Security Writer at TechRadar Pro, where he has specialized in covering the intersection of geopolitics, cyber-warfare, and business security.

Benedict provides detailed analysis on state-sponsored threat actors, APT groups, and the protection of critical national infrastructure, with his reporting bridging the gap between technical threat intelligence and B2B security strategy.

Benedict holds an MA (Distinction) in Security, Intelligence, and Diplomacy from the University of Buckingham Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies (BUCSIS), with his specialization providing him with a robust academic framework for deconstructing complex international conflicts and intelligence operations, and the ability to translate intricate security data into actionable insights.

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