OpenAI claims to have evidence that Chinese rival DeepSeek used the U.S. company’s Artificial Intelligence model to train its chatbot, according to Bloomberg News.

The release of DeepSeek’s open-source model called R1 has caused a major uproar in global financial markets, as the Chinese company appears to have achieved results similar to those of its competitors who invested far greater amounts of money and resources.

Both AI companies and investors alike are trying to predict the impact of the rapid rise of DeepSeek’s model.

According to Bloomberg, OpenAI and its largest investor and strategic partner, Microsoft, are investigating whether DeepSeek obtained data in an unauthorized manner after observing cases of individuals extracting large volumes of data from OpenAI’s products.

The Financial Times also reported that OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, said it has evidence of “dataset distillation”. This is a technique in machine learning that allows a large dataset to be condensed into a much smaller one while retaining the critical information needed to train a model. If this technique has been used by DeepSeek to have been copied it is a violation of OpenAI’s terms of use.

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