By TOI Tech Desk
Publication Date: 2026-05-02 15:09:00
US State Department has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it says are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including AI startup DeepSeek, to steal intellectual property from U.S. artificial intelligence labs. 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.” For those un aware, Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones as part of an effort to lower the costs of training a powerful new AI tool.The US government order follows a complaint where Anthropic accused three prominent Chinese AI companies of using its Claude chatbot on a massive scale to secretly train rival models. In a blog post, San Francisco–based Anthropic alleged that Chinese labs DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax violated corporate law by interacting with Claude, its market-reshaping vibe-coding tool.Incidentally, among the companies that Anthropic and the US government have accused is Moonshot AI whose CEO and founder Zhilin Yang took the stage at Nvidia’s biggest annual event of the year. Zhilin Yang was a speaker at Nvidia’s GTC 2026 annual event.
What Anthropic complaint said on Moonshot AI
In its open blog, Anthropic said, “We have identified industrial-scale campaigns by three AI laboratories –…
