OpenAI has accused China's DeepSeek, which upended the US tech industry this week, of secretly using OpenAI's data to train its rival chatbot.
"We know PRC (China) based companies — and others — are constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies," OpenAI said in a statement obtained by Bloomberg, according to the Verge. "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 US government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology."
The accusation from the Sam Altman-founded company is especially paradoxical considering OpenAI allegedly trained its models by combing the internet without permission.
Last month, the New York Times sued the Sam Altman-founded company for "unlawful use" of its output to create the OpenAI chatbot, the Guardian reported. More than a dozen authors, including "Game of Thrones" creator George RR Martin, sued the company in September 2024, accusing it of "systematic theft on a mass scale."
David Sacks, a venture capitalist appointed by President Trump as the principal AI and cryptocurrency "tsar," told Fox News on Tuesday that there is evidence DeepSeek "distilled knowledge out of OpenAI models."
"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 to prevent distillation," he added.
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