OpenAI says it has evidence suggesting Chinese AI startup DeepSeek used its proprietary models to train a competing open-source system through “distillation,” a technique where smaller models learn from larger ones’ outputs.
The San Francisco-based company, along with partner Microsoft, blocked suspected DeepSeek accounts from accessing its API last year after detecting potential terms of service violations. DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model has achieved comparable results to leading U.S. models despite claiming minimal resources.