By Eduardo Baptista, Ethan Wang and Che Pan BEIJING, April 24 (Reuters) - DeepSeek, the Chinese startup whose low-cost AI model stunned the world last year, launched on Friday a preview of a highly awaited new model adapted for Huawei chip technology,

DeepSeek released its new model just days after Moonshot AI, another Chinese start-up, introduced its latest open-source model, Kimi 2.6. While these systems trail the coding capabilities of the leading U.S. models from Anthropic and OpenAI, the gap is narrowing.

The US warned allies of alleged AI IP theft by Chinese firms like DeepSeek, while China denied the claims ahead of key talks.

The Trump administration is vowing to crack down on foreign tech companies’ exploitation of U.S. artificial intelligence models, singling out China at a time that country is narrowing the gap with the U.

Foreign entities primarily based in China have conducted “industrial-scale” campaigns to crib frontier AI models from US companies, Michael Kratsios, White House director of the office of science and technology policy,