China AI leaders told to avoid US travel over ‘security issues’

Chinese authorities are instructing the country’s top artificial intelligence (AI) entrepreneurs and researchers to avoid travel to the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The authorities are concerned that Chinese AI experts travelling abroad could divulge confidential information about the nation’s progress, the newspaper said.

Authorities also fear that executives could be detained and used as a bargaining chip in US-China negotiations, the Journal said, drawing parallels to the detention of a Huawei executive in Canada at Washington’s request during the first Trump administration.

The US and China are locked in a global AI race, with Chinese startup DeepSeek recently launching AI models that it claims rival or surpass US industry leaders such as OpenAI and Alphabet Inc’s Google, at significantly lower cost.

The White House and China’s State Council Information Office, which handles media enquiries on behalf of the government, did not immediately respond to requests from Reuters for comment.

Chinese President Xi Jinping told a meeting of top Communist Party officials on Friday to improve China’s overall security, including in the realms of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, China’s state broadcaster reported on Saturday.

“We should give top priority to defending the country’s political security,” Xi was quoted as having told other members of the governing Politburo.

Last month, the Chinese leader held a rare meeting with some of the biggest names in the world’s second-largest economy’s technology sector, urging them to “show their talent” and be confident in the power of China’s model and market.

Chinese executives who choose to travel are instructed to report their plans before leaving and, upon returning, to brief authorities on what they did and whom they met, the Journal report said.

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng declined an invitation to attend an AI summit in Paris in February, according to the report. Another founder of a major Chinese AI startup cancelled a planned US trip last year following instructions from Beijing, the Journal added.

Meanwhile, DeepSeek on Saturday disclosed some cost and revenue data related to its hit V3 and R1 models, claiming a theoretical cost-profit ratio of up to 545% per day, though it cautioned that actual revenue would be significantly lower.

This marks the first time the Hangzhou-based company has revealed any information about its profit margins from less computationally intensive “inference” tasks, the stage after training that involves trained AI models making predictions or performing tasks, such as through chatbots.

The revelation could further rattle AI stocks outside China that plunged in January after web and app chatbots powered by its R1 and V3 models surged in popularity worldwide.

The sell-off was partly caused by DeepSeek’s claims that it spent less than $6 million on chips used to train the model, much less than what US rivals like OpenAI have spent.

The chips DeepSeek claims it used, Nvidia’s H800, are also much less powerful than what OpenAI and other US AI firms have access to, making investors question even further US AI firms’ pledges to spend billions of dollars on cutting-edge chips.

DeepSeek said in a GitHub post published on Saturday that assuming the cost of renting one H800 chip is $2 per hour, the total daily inference cost for its V3 and R1 models is $87,072.

In contrast, the theoretical daily revenue generated by these models is $562,027, leading to a cost-profit ratio of 545%. In a year this would add up to just over $200 million in revenue.

However, the firm added that its “actual revenue is substantially lower” because the cost of using its V3 model is lower than the R1 model, only some services are monetised as web and app access remain free, and developers pay less during off-peak hours.

Reuters