OpenAI accuses DeepSeek of intellectual property breach

OpenAI, the San Francisco-based creator of ChatGPT, has raised concerns over alleged intellectual property breaches by DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence start-up.

In a report by Financial Times on Wednesday, the company claims it has found evidence suggesting DeepSeek used OpenAI’s proprietary models to train its open-source competitor, a move that could violate OpenAI’s terms of service.

DeepSeek is an AI search platform that leverages deep learning algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) to deliver highly relevant, intent-driven results.

The platform was launched in 2023 with two versions: DeepSeek-R1, a standard model, and DeepSeek-R1-Zero, which features unsupervised fine-tuning for superior reasoning capabilities.

On Monday, DeepSeek overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded free application on the Apple store in the United States.

According to the publication, OpenAI said it observed signs of “distillation,” a technique where developers use outputs from larger, more advanced models to enhance the performance of smaller, cost-effective ones.

While distillation is a common practice in the AI industry, OpenAI suspects DeepSeek may have used the method to develop a rival model, which would breach its 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,” a source close to OpenAI told the Financial Times.

Checks by TheCable show that OpenAI’s terms of service explicitly prohibit users from copying its services or using its outputs to develop competing models.

“You may not use our services for any illegal, harmful, or abusive activity. For example, you may not: Use our services in a way that infringes, misappropriates, or violates anyone’s rights,” OpenAI said.

“Modify, copy, lease, sell, or distribute any of our services.

“Attempt to or assist anyone to reverse engineer, decompile, or discover the source code or underlying components of our services, including our models, algorithms, or systems (except to the extent this restriction is prohibited by applicable law).

“Automatically or programmatically extract data or output.”

The allegations by OpenAI have sparked concerns about intellectual property rights in the rapidly evolving AI industry.

Financial Times explained that OpenAI and its partner Microsoft reportedly investigated accounts believed to be linked to DeepSeek.

The accounts were using OpenAI’s application programming interface (API) and were blocked on suspicion of violating terms of service.