Did the upstart Chinese tech company DeepSeek copy ChatGPT to make the artificial intelligence technology that shook Wall Street this week?
That's what ChatGPT maker OpenAI is suggesting, along with U.S. President Donald Trump's top AI adviser. Neither has disclosed specific evidence of intellectual property theft, but the comments could fuel a reexamination of some of the assumptions that led to a panic in the U.S. over DeepSeek's advancements.
“There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models,” David Sacks, Trump's AI adviser, told Fox News on Tuesday. “And I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about this.”
DeepSeek and the hedge fund it grew out of, High-Flyer, didn’t immediately respond to emailed questions Wednesday, the start of China’s extended Lunar New Year holiday.
OpenAI said in a statement that China-based companies “are constantly trying to distill the models of leading U.S. AI companies” but didn't publicly call out DeepSeek specifically.
OpenAI's official terms of use ban the technique known as distillation that enables a new AI model to learn by repeatedly querying a bigger one that's already been trained. The company has been working with its business partner Microsoft to identify accounts attempting to distill its models and then banning those accounts and revoking their access. Microsoft declined to comment.
OpenAI said it will also work “closely with the U.S. government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take U.S. technology.”
The San Francisco company has itself been accused of copyright theft in lawsuits from media organizations, book authors and others in cases that are still working through courts in the U.S. and elsewhere.
“Distillation will violate most terms of service, yet it’s ironic — or even hypocritical — that Big Tech is calling it out," said a statement Wednesday from tech investor and Cornell University lecturer Lutz Finger. "Training ChatGPT on Forbes or New York Times content also violated their terms of service."
Finger, who formerly worked for Google and LinkedIn, said that while it is likely that DeepSeek used the technique, it will be hard to find proof because it's easy to disguise and avoid detection.
DeepSeek describes its use of distillation techniques in its public research papers, and discloses its reliance on openly accessible AI models made by Facebook parent company Meta and Chinese tech company Alibaba. No mention is made of OpenAI, which closes off its models, except to show how DeepSeek compares on performance.