OpenAI and akropolistravel.com the White House have implicated DeepSeek of using ChatGPT to cheaply train its brand-new chatbot.
- Experts in tech law state OpenAI has little recourse under intellectual residential or commercial property and contract law.
- OpenAI's regards to use might use however are mostly unenforceable, they state.
This week, OpenAI and the White House implicated DeepSeek of something comparable to theft.

In a flurry of press declarations, they said the Chinese upstart had bombarded OpenAI's chatbots with inquiries and hoovered up the resulting information trove to rapidly and inexpensively train a design that's now practically as excellent.

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

OpenAI is not stating whether the company prepares to pursue legal action, instead assuring what a spokesperson described "aggressive, proactive countermeasures to safeguard our technology."

But could it? Could it sue DeepSeek on "you stole our content" grounds, similar to 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 posed this question to professionals in technology 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 hard time proving a copyright or copyright claim, these lawyers said.

"The concern is whether ChatGPT outputs" - implying the responses it produces in action to "are copyrightable at all," Mason Kortz of Harvard Law School said.

That's because it's unclear whether the responses ChatGPT spits out certify as "creativity," he said.

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