Lots of if's here. They need specific US employee contacts at a company thars quickly growing and one of those needs to be willing to breach their contracts to share it. That contact also needs to trust that Deepseek can properly utilize such code and completely undercut their own work.
Lot of hoops when there's simply other models to utilize publicly
How big are the weights for the full model? If it's on the scale of a large operating system image then it might be easy to sneak, but if it's an entire data lake, not so much.
devil's advocate says that we know that foreign (hell even national) intelligence attempt to infiltrate agents by having them become employees at any company they are interested. So the idea isn't just pulled from thin air as a concept. I do agree that it is a big if with no corroborating evidence for the specific claim.
Lot of hoops when there's simply other models to utilize publicly