OpenAI and Government Officials Discuss DeepSeek Development

OpenAI has talked with government officials about what the company has learned about whether DeepSeek used data obtained in an unauthorized way from OpenAI’s technology.

“We’ve seen some evidence and we’re continuing to review,” OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane told Bloomberg Television on Monday (Feb. 10).

Lehane did not elaborate on what the company discussed with government officials, Bloomberg reported Monday.

The launch of a new artificial intelligence (AI) model from DeepSeek led to a plunge in tech stocks in late January when it was reported that the model achieved a comparable performance to those of U.S. rivals like OpenAI but claimed to use substantially fewer Nvidia chips.

The news rocked the markets as investors reconsidered the need to invest in AI hardware.

The sell-off came a week after OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX announced a project called Stargate that plans to spend $100 billion to half a trillion dollars to build data centers and other AI infrastructure.

On Jan. 28, it was reported that OpenAI and Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s partner and biggest investor, were investigating whether OpenAI’s data was improperly accessed by a group tied to DeepSeek.

Sources familiar with the matter said Microsoft security researchers in the fall discovered people who could be tied to DeepSeek withdrawing a large amount of data using OpenAI’s application programming interface (API).

This activity could be a violation of OpenAI’s terms of service or could indicate the group attempted to remove OpenAI’s limits on how much data they could obtain.

White House AI czar David Sacks told Fox News on Jan. 28 that there is “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek used the output of OpenAI’s models to develop its own technology.

It was reported Monday that Google’s AI chief, Demis Hassabis, said the idea that DeepSeek spent just under $6 million to develop an AI model that rivals those of American tech giants is “exaggerated and a little bit misleading.”

Hassabis argued that DeepSeek “seems to have only reported the cost of the final training round, which is a fraction of the total cost.” He also dismissed the idea that the rise of DeepSeek has shaken up the economics of AI development.

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