Microsoft and OpenAI are looking into whether a group connected to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek accessed OpenAI’s technology without permission.
According to a Bloomberg report on January 29, Microsoft’s security team noticed unusual activity in late 2024, involving large amounts of data being pulled from OpenAI’s application programming interface (API).
Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, alerted the company about the issue, as it could mean that someone bypassed limits on data access or violated the terms of service.
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While OpenAI did not directly accuse DeepSeek, a spokesperson acknowledged concerns about AI companies in China and elsewhere attempting to use the work of leading US firms to develop their own models.
The spokesperson told Bloomberg, “We know PRC-based companies—and others—are constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies".
David Sacks, who advises the White House on AI and cryptocurrency, spoke to Fox News on January 28 about the situation. He suggested that DeepSeek may have trained its model using OpenAI’s outputs through a process called distillation. This technique involves one AI system learning from the outputs of another.
Sacks stated:
There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled knowledge out of OpenAI models.
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