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OpenAI’s concerns have been echoed by the recently appointed White House “AI and crypto czar”, David Sacks.
Speaking on Fox News, he suggested that DeepSeek may have used the models developed by OpenAI to get better, a process called knowledge distillation.
“There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models,” Mr Sacks said.
“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.”
The US has already taken steps to guard its AI advances, with rules that seek to cut China off from advanced chips and steer investments to the US in the name of national security.
At his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Trump’s nominee for Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, also shared concerns about theft and raised the prospect of further US action to protect US AI companies.
“What this showed is that our export controls, not backed by tariffs, are like a whack-a-mole model,” Lutnick says.
In a statement, OpenAI said Chinese and other companies were “constantly trying to distil the models of leading US AI companies”.
“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 added.
