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 itself has been accused of building ChatGPT by inappropriately accessing content it didn't have the rights to.

DeepSeek is causing havoc throughout the AI industry. U.S.-based tech companies that have heavily invested in AI saw their stocks take a tumble this week after the China-based startup released a new AI model on par with OpenAI's latest model, yet much cheaper to train — plus, DeepSeek made it free and open source.

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

Sam Altman hailed the Chinese firm's low-cost AI model as "impressive" and said OpenAI would accelerate the release of "better models" in response.

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI research lab, has released an advanced AI model which rivals leading models from OpenAI. The DeepSeek-R1 model can perform complicated mathematical reasoning, code generation, and more with fewer resources than its American competitors.