OpenAI and the White House have actually accused DeepSeek of utilizing ChatGPT to cheaply train its new chatbot.
- Experts in tech law state OpenAI has little recourse under copyright and contract law.
- OpenAI's terms of use might use but are mostly unenforceable, they state.
Today, OpenAI and the White House accused DeepSeek of something akin to theft.
In a flurry of press statements, they said the Chinese upstart had actually bombarded OpenAI's chatbots with questions and hoovered up the resulting data trove to rapidly and inexpensively train a design that's now nearly as good.
The Trump administration's top AI czar stated this training procedure, called "distilling," totaled up to intellectual property theft. OpenAI, on the other hand, told Business Insider and other outlets that it's examining whether "DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models."
OpenAI is not stating whether the company prepares to pursue legal action, instead guaranteeing what a representative called "aggressive, proactive countermeasures to secure our innovation."
But could it? Could it take legal action against DeepSeek on "you stole our material" premises, similar to the grounds OpenAI was itself sued on in an ongoing copyright claim submitted in 2023 by The New York Times and other news outlets?
BI positioned this question to experts in innovation law, who stated 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 difficult time proving an intellectual property or copyright claim, these lawyers stated.
"The concern is whether ChatGPT outputs" - meaning the responses it produces in reaction to queries - "are copyrightable at all," Mason Kortz of Harvard Law School stated.
That's due to the fact that it's unclear whether the responses ChatGPT spits out certify as "imagination," he stated.
"There's a doctrine that says imaginative expression is copyrightable, however truths and concepts are not," Kortz, who teaches at Harvard's Cyberlaw Clinic, stated.
"There's a big concern in copyright law right now about whether the outputs of a generative AI can ever make up imaginative expression or if they are always unguarded truths," he added.
Could OpenAI roll those dice anyway and declare that its outputs are protected?
That's unlikely, [users.atw.hu](http://users.atw.hu/samp-info-forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=d09d528edb62fda78d40f9aaa01734b0&action=profile
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OpenAI has Little Legal Recourse against DeepSeek, Tech Law Experts Say
Alba Anthony edited this page 2025-02-05 12:02:27 +01:00