OpenAI and the White House have actually accused DeepSeek of using ChatGPT to cheaply train its brand-new chatbot.
- Experts in tech law say OpenAI has little recourse under copyright and agreement law.
- OpenAI's regards to use might apply however are largely unenforceable, they say.
Today, OpenAI and the White House accused DeepSeek of something similar to theft.

In a flurry of press declarations, they said the Chinese upstart had actually bombarded OpenAI's chatbots with inquiries and hoovered up the resulting data trove to quickly and inexpensively train a design that's now nearly as good.

The Trump administration's leading AI czar said this training procedure, called "distilling," totaled up to copyright theft. OpenAI, coastalplainplants.org meanwhile, told Business Insider and other outlets that it's investigating whether "DeepSeek might have inappropriately distilled our designs."

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

But could it? Could it sue DeepSeek on "you stole our content" grounds, just like the premises OpenAI was itself sued on in an ongoing copyright claim submitted in 2023 by The New York Times and other news outlets?

BI postured this concern to specialists in innovation law, who said challenging DeepSeek in the courts would be an uphill struggle for OpenAI now that the content-appropriation shoe is on the other foot.

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

"The concern is whether ChatGPT outputs" - indicating the responses it produces 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 stated.

"There's a teaching that states innovative expression is copyrightable, but truths and ideas are not," Kortz, who teaches at Harvard's Cyberlaw Clinic, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile