TMTPOST -- The Trump administration is examining effect of DeepSeek on national security intelligence as a White House official signals the Chinese startup could be involved in intellectual property (IP) theft.
Credit：China Central Television
The National Security Council (NSC) is “looking into” the national security implications of DeepSeek application, said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at her first press briefing on Tuesday, adding that she had discussed with the NSC, which provides advice on national security and foreign policy matters for the U.S. president, earlier that day.
Leavitt at the press also echoed American President Donald Trump’s comments Monday night, calling DeepSeek as a "wake-up call" for the U.S. AI industry. But the press secretary still felt confident as the White House is working to "ensure American AI dominance."
In an interview with Fox News Tuesday, the White House AI and crypto “czar” David Sacks raised concerns about DeepSeek, noting “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek relied on the output of OpenAI’s models to help develop its own technology.
Asked about whether DeepSeek stole intellectual property from the U.S., Sacks said it is "possible." Then he described a machine learning technique called distillation. Under the technique, developers can leverage the outputs of a larger model to enable a smaller one to achieve similar performance on a specific task.
For Sacks, the distillation process allows student AI models interrogate parent models, mimic their logic, and "suck" their knowledge from them.
"There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models," Sacks said. "And I think one of the things you're going to see over the next few months is our leading AI companies taking steps to try and prevent distillation…that would definitely slow down some of these copycat models."
Just as his warning posted on X on Monday, Sacks warned American AI companies against complacent. "I think that our AI companies got a little distracted," Sacks told Fox News. "To be honest, I think that maybe they got a little bit complacent. They didn't realize how close these Chinese companies were to them. They wasted a lot of time on things like DEI."
Sacks admitted DeepSeek’s achievement, calling R1, the reasoning model launched earlier this month, basically comparable in capabilities to the OpenAI 01 model, which came out about four months ago. “I think the Chinese companies are catching up very fast,” said Sacks, estimating the U.S. AI firms have around three to six months ahead of their Chinese peers.
Sacks still believes U.S. can maintain its leadership as there are still great advantages to having a lot of chips, especially the most advanced ones, while he agreed the rise of DeepSeek is waking up American AI sector.
"We just can’t afford to get distracted by things that don’t matter," Sacks advised. "Like President Trump said, I think it's a wake-up call. They've got to focus on being scrappy and and on competing. And I think you're going to see them get, I think, a lot more focus now on on the competition."
In response to Sacks’ allegations, OpenAI stated in a statement that it is aware of companies from China and other areas are constantly trying to distill the models of leading U.S. companies. "As the leading builder of AI, we engage in countermeasures to protect our IP, including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models, and believe as we go forward that it is critically important that we are working closely with the U.S. government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology,"said OpenAI.
Trump warned Monday that the rise of DeepSeek “should be a wake-up call” for U.S. tech companies as the app is shaking the AI sector.
Trump said he still expected U.S. tech companies to lead the AI race, while admitting the challenge posed by DeepSeek, which has shocked Silicon Valley and Wall Street these days with AI models deliver performance comparable to leading offerings at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek jumped to the No.1 spot in app stores at weekend, dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app in U.S. on Apple’s App Store.
Trump said he considered the low-cost model to be “very much a positive development” for AI overall, because “instead of spending billions and billions, you’ll spend less, and you’ll come up with, hopefully, the same solution.”
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