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 accuses Chinese AI firm DeepSeek of stealing its content through "knowledge distillation," sparking concerns over security, ethics, and national interests.

Experts say AI model distillation is likely widespread and hard to detect, but DeepSeek has not admitted to using it on its full models.