White House AI czar David Sacks alleged Tuesday that DeepSeek had used OpenAI’s data outputs to train its latest models through a process called distillation.

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

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