OpenAI claims to have found evidence that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek secretly used data produced by OpenAI’s technology to improve their own AI models, according to the Financial Times. If true, DeepSeek would be in violation of OpenAI’s terms of service. In a statement, the company said it is actively investigating.

OpenAI believes DeepSeek used a process called “distillation,” which helps make smaller AI models perform better by learning from larger ones.

OpenAI told the Financial Times that it found evidence linking DeepSeek to the use of distillation — a common technique developers use to train AI models by extracting data from