OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property. The San Francisco-based ChatGPT maker told the Financial Times it had seen some evidence of “distillation”, which it suspects to be from DeepSeek. The technique is used by developers to obtain better performance on smaller models by using outputs from larger, more capable ones, allowing them to achieve similar results on specific tasks at a much lower cost. Distillation is a common practice in the industry but the concern was that DeepSeek may be doing it to build its own rival model, which is a breach of OpenAI’s terms of service. “The issue is when you [take it out of the platform and] are doing it to create your own model for your own purposes,” said one person close to OpenAI. OpenAI declined to comment further or provide details of its evidence. Its terms of service state users cannot “copy” any of its services or “use output to develop models that compete with OpenAI”. DeepSeek’s release of its R1 reasoning model has surprised markets, as well as investors and technology companies in Silicon Valley. Its built-on-a-shoestring models have attained high rankings and comparable results to leading US models.

Full story : OpenAI says it has seen some evidence that DeepSeek used “distillation” to train its open-source competitor by using outputs from OpenAI’s proprietary models.