OpenAI and the White House have accused DeepSeek of utilizing ChatGPT to cheaply train its new chatbot.
- Experts in tech law state OpenAI has little option under copyright and agreement law.
- OpenAI's regards to use may apply however are largely unenforceable, they state.
This week, OpenAI and voyostars.com the White House implicated DeepSeek of something comparable to theft.

In a flurry of press declarations, they stated the Chinese upstart had bombarded OpenAI's chatbots with queries and up the resulting data trove to quickly and cheaply train a design that's now nearly as great.

The Trump administration's leading AI czar said this training process, called "distilling," totaled up to intellectual property theft. OpenAI, meanwhile, told Business Insider and other outlets that it's examining whether "DeepSeek might have wrongly distilled our models."

OpenAI is not saying whether the company prepares to pursue legal action, rather assuring what a spokesperson termed "aggressive, proactive countermeasures to secure our technology."

But could it? Could it sue DeepSeek on "you took our material" grounds, similar to the grounds OpenAI was itself sued on in an ongoing copyright claim submitted in 2023 by The New York City Times and other news outlets?

BI positioned this question to experts in innovation law, who said challenging DeepSeek in the courts would be an uphill battle for OpenAI now that the content-appropriation shoe is on the other foot.

OpenAI would have a hard time proving an intellectual residential or commercial property or copyright claim, these lawyers stated.

"The concern is whether ChatGPT outputs" - implying the answers it creates in reaction to inquiries - "are copyrightable at all," Mason Kortz of Harvard Law School said.

That's because it's unclear whether the answers ChatGPT spits out qualify as "imagination," he said.

"There's a teaching that says imaginative expression is copyrightable, but facts and concepts are not," Kortz, who teaches at Harvard's Cyberlaw Clinic, stated.

"There's a huge concern in intellectual residential or commercial property law right now about whether the outputs of a generative AI can ever make up innovative expression or if they are necessarily unprotected facts," he added.

Could OpenAI roll those dice anyhow and claim that its outputs are protected?

That's unlikely, engel-und-waisen.de the lawyers stated.

OpenAI is currently on the record in The New york city Times' copyright case arguing that training AI is an allowed "fair use" exception to copyright security.

If they do a 180 and inform DeepSeek that training is not a reasonable use, "that may return to kind of bite them," Kortz said. "DeepSeek could state, 'Hey, weren't you simply stating that training is reasonable usage?'"

There may be a difference in between the Times and DeepSeek cases, experienciacortazar.com.ar Kortz included.

"Maybe it's more transformative to turn news articles into a model" - as the Times accuses OpenAI of doing - "than it is to turn outputs of a model into another design," as DeepSeek is said to have actually done, Kortz stated.

"But this still puts OpenAI in a quite tricky scenario with regard to the line it's been toeing relating to reasonable use," he included.

A breach-of-contract claim is most likely

A breach-of-contract claim is much likelier than an IP-based suit, though it includes its own set of problems, said Anupam Chander, who teaches innovation law at Georgetown University.

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The terms of service for Big Tech chatbots like those established by OpenAI and Anthropic forbid using their content as training fodder for a competing AI design.

"So possibly that's the suit you may perhaps bring - a contract-based claim, not an IP-based claim," [Chander](http://hu.feng.ku.angn.i.ub.i?hellip