Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek disrupted Silicon Valley with the release of cheaply developed AI models that compete with flagship offerings from OpenAI — but the ChatGPT maker suspects they were built upon OpenAI data.

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.

David Sacks says OpenAI has evidence that Chinese company DeepSeek used a technique called "distillation" to build a rival model.

Following the launch of DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup has been causing quite a stir in the industry. Nvidia saw its stock price fall, while ChatGPT was found to be slower than the newcomer in some tests. But now ChatGPT creator OpenAI says that DeepSeek might have used its AI models for training.

Alibaba claims that its Qwen2.5-Max artificial intelligence model outperformed its rivals at OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek.