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, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property.

The companies claim they have evidence that the Chinese company trained their AI model by using data it had lifted from OpenAI. OpenAI claimed to the Financial Times that it had evidence DeepSeek trained its AI by using OpenAI's models.

OpenAI alleged Wednesday that DeepSeek — its newly ascendant Chinese competitor in the AI space — might have used a process called distillation to incorporate OpenAI's abilities to train its model. Basically,