Amid rising tensions in the global AI race, OpenAI has accused Chinese AI firm DeepSeek of improperly leveraging American-developed technology to build competing models.
In a letter addressed to the US House Select Committee, the Sam Altman-led company claimed that DeepSeek has been “free-riding” on capabilities created by OpenAI and other US frontier AI firms. The company warned lawmakers that DeepSeek is using unfair and increasingly advanced techniques to replicate and train its own systems.
“Ahead of DeepSeek’s expected Lunar New Year release of a new, more powerful model, we are providing the Committee with an updated assessment of its evolving distillation tactics,” OpenAI wrote in the memo.
The company stressed the importance of infrastructure in the AI race. “OpenAI believes that infrastructure is destiny: chip development, power generation, transmission, and data center capacity will determine which countries can train and deploy frontier systems. This is why we’re investing through our Stargate Project to expand US AI infrastructure to 10 GW by 2029, and just one year in, we’re already over halfway toward that Goal,” the memo stated.
“But we are equally focused on ensuring a level playing field, one where the People’s Republic of China (PRC) can’t advance autocratic AI by appropriating and repackaging American innovation”.
OpenAI explained that the “distillation” tactic involves using an older, more advanced AI model to evaluate and refine the outputs of a newer model. This allows knowledge and patterns from the established system to improve the newer one.
“We have observed usage patterns from several major Chinese LLM providers and some university research lab usage that are consistent with, and would be highly beneficial for, creating competitor models through Distillation,” the company said.
OpenAI further alleged that accounts linked to DeepSeek employees attempted to bypass access restrictions using obfuscated third-party routers and masked sources. “We also know that DeepSeek employees developed code to access US AI models and obtain outputs for distillation in programmatic ways. We believe that DeepSeek also uses third-party routers to access frontier models from other US labs,” it added.
Highlighting its response strategy, OpenAI said: “the best way to ward off a fast-oncoming PRC making headway around the world for autocratic AI is continued investment in American AI leadership and global adoption of responsibly developed, democratic AI.”
The company noted strong growth in adoption. “Adoption of our latest agentic coding model, GPT-5.3-Codex, is up 60% week-over-week. Adoption of ChatGPT is at ~10% monthly growth,” it said.
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