Sam Altman’s OpenAI said Chinese competitor DeepSeek could be committing intellectual property theft.
DeepSeek, an emerging Chinese artificial intelligence company, sent shockwaves through the technology world when its AI model surged to the top of the app store in the United States this week. Its ability to replicate, and sometimes surpass, more established and expensive AI programs roiled the stock market, sending investors and Silicon Valley into a panic.
However, according to the Financial Times, Altman’s company expressed concern Wednesday that DeepSeek’s model had improperly used components of Open AI’s model.
According to OpenAI, DeepSeek may have used a technique called “distillation” to build its own rival R1 model, which could represent intellectual property theft.
The news comes after President Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence czar David Sacks announced similar concerns on Tuesday. He said there was “substantial evidence” DeepSeek had improperly copied OpenAI’s models to build their own.
“It is possible” that IP theft surrounding the distillation technique had occurred, Sacks said during a Fox News interview. “There’s a technique in AI called distillation . . . when one model learns from another model [and] kind of sucks the knowledge out of the parent model.”
“There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled knowledge out of OpenAI models and I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about this,” Sacks continued.
Microsoft, Open AI’s largest investor, first alerted the company it suspected individuals linked to DeepSeek were inappropriately withdrawing data from OpenAI’s systems, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. Microsoft and OpenAI are investigating the allegations to determine whether DeepSeek violated restrictions on how much data they could access.
OpenAI declined to address Sach’s concerns about DeepSeek in comments to the outlet.
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“We know PRC based companies, and others, are constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in the statement, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “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 Washington Examiner contacted OpenAI and DeepSeek for comment but did not receive a response.
