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Report: Microsoft, OpenAI investigating whether DeepSeek was trained on stolen U.S. data

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DeepSeek continues to disrupt the U.S. markets and companies as a new competitor in the AI space and the U.S. is probably not too happy. There have been concerns about data and privacy, especially since DeepSeek claims that it trained its AI models on far fewer resources compared to others. According to a report from Bloomberg, Microsoft and OpenAI are currently investigating whether DeepSeek has improperly accessed OpenAI's data.

Microsoft's security researchers detected unusual activity in late 2024 where developer accounts, believed to be linked to DeepSeek, were exfiltrating large amounts of data through OpenAI's API. Although developers can use the OpenAI API to integrate its models into their own applications, distilling the outputs is a violation of OpenAI's usage policies.

President Donald Trump's artificial intelligence czar, David Sacks, said in an interview with Fox News, that there's substantial evidence that DeepSeek learned the output of OpenAI's models to help develop its own technology cheaply.

"..there's a technique in AI called distillation when one model learns from another model effectively. What happens is that the student models asks the parent model a lot of questions, just like a human would learn, but AIs can ask millions of questions and essentially mimic the reasoning process that they learn from the parent model.

There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled knowledge out of OpenAI models and I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about this.”

OpenAI also provided a statement to Fox News based on Sack's allegations:

"We know PRC based companies—and others—are constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies. As the leading builder of AI, we engage in countermeasures to protect our IP, including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models, and believe as we go forward that it is critically important that we are working closely with the U.S. government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology."

Sam Altman had earlier responded to DeepSeek's launch of its R1 reasoning model by calling it "impressive" and that he is welcoming the competition.

At a Florida retreat, President Trump told House Republicans that the release of DeepSeek should be a "wake-up call" for U.S. companies (via CBS News on YouTube).

"Today and over the last couple of days, I've been reading about China and some of the companies in China, one in particular coming up with a faster method of AI and a much less expensive method. That's good because you don't have to spend as much money. I view that as a positive, as an asset.

Hopefully, the release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win,"

The White House is also closely monitoring all of the DeepSeek news, due to potential national security reasons. Officials are worried that DeepSeek's technology could be used to threaten U.S. interests, especially given the model's censorship of sensitive topics like Tiananmen Square and Taiwan.

Source: Bloomberg

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