The US government has already implemented measures to safeguard its AI advancements
In a rapidly evolving battle for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has voiced concerns that competitors, including China’s DeepSeek, are leveraging its work to develop their own advanced AI tools.
DeepSeek has emerged as a formidable challenger in the AI landscape, reportedly emulating ChatGPT’s performance at a fraction of the cost. This development has prompted OpenAI, along with its major investor Microsoft, to investigate whether DeepSeek has used OpenAI’s proprietary data without authorisation.
Microsoft is currently examining potential data misuse, while DeepSeek has not yet issued a response to these allegations.
David Sacks, recently appointed as the White House’s “AI and Crypto Czar,” echoed OpenAI’s concerns on Fox News. He suggested that DeepSeek may have employed a technique called knowledge distillation, which involves extracting knowledge from pre-existing models to improve new ones.
“There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models,” said Sacks. “I think one of the things you’re going to see over the next few months is our leading AI companies taking steps to try and prevent distillation… That would definitely slow down some of these copycat models.”
Concerns Over Security & Ethics
The rise of DeepSeek has sparked national security concerns in the United States. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the National Security Council is assessing the potential implications of DeepSeek’s operations.
“I spoke with [the National Security Council] this morning. They are looking into what [the national security implications] may be,” said Leavitt.
In a related move, the US Navy has reportedly banned its personnel from using DeepSeek’s apps due to “potential security and ethical concerns associated with the model’s origin and usage.” Data safety experts have cautioned users about the tool, given its collection of large amounts of personal data, which is stored on servers in China.
Meanwhile, DeepSeek claims it has been the target of cyberattacks, announcing on Monday that it would temporarily limit new user registrations due to “large-scale malicious attacks.”
A banner on the company’s website indicates that registration may remain busy as a result of these incidents.
Intellectual Property Debate
The controversy has reignited discussions around intellectual property rights in AI. Naomi Haefner, Assistant Professor of Technology Management at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, noted that the origins of DeepSeek’s training process remain unclear.
“It is unclear whether DeepSeek really trained its models from scratch,” she said. “OpenAI has stated that they believe DeepSeek may have misappropriated large amounts of data from them. If this is the case, then the claims about training the model very cheaply are deceptive. Until someone replicates the training approach, we won’t know for sure whether such cost-efficient training is really possible.”
Crystal van Oosterom, AI Venture Partner at OpenOcean, acknowledged that DeepSeek likely built upon publicly available research from major American and European institutions.
However, she added that this practice is not uncommon in the AI sector, where companies often face accusations of disrespecting intellectual property rights.
US Weighs Further Measures
The US government has already implemented measures to safeguard its AI advancements, including restrictions on the export of advanced chips to China and incentives to steer investments into the US technology sector.
Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s nominee for Commerce Secretary, expressed concerns during his confirmation hearing about the need for stronger protections. “What this showed is that our export controls, not backed by tariffs, are like a whack-a-mole model,” he remarked, hinting at potential future action.
OpenAI emphasised the need for closer collaboration with the government to protect cutting-edge AI models from exploitation. “As we go forward… it is critically important that we are working closely with the US government to best protect the most capable models,” it said in a statement.
As the global AI race intensifies, the implications of DeepSeek’s emergence are likely to shape the industry’s future and prompt new strategies for safeguarding intellectual property and user data.
