Sam Altman’s OpenAI said Chinese competitor DeepSeek could be committing intellectual property theft. DeepSeek, an emerging Chinese artificial intelligence company, sent shockwaves through the technology world when its AI model surged to the top of the app store in the United States this week.

In its own research, DeepSeek said it had “distilled” models from its R1 system based on other open-source systems. Unlike OpenAI’s closed systems, some models such as Meta’s Llama are open-source and freely available for use.