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. The San Francisco-based ChatGPT maker told the FT it had seen some evidence of “distillation”,

The controversy arises as OpenAI claims DeepSeek plagiarized its plagiarism machine by allegedly using ChatGPT outputs for training. OpenAI has accused Chinese AI startup DeepSeek of using a technique called “distillation” to train its own large language model (LLM) using outputs from ChatGPT.