Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek disrupted Silicon Valley with the release of cheaply developed AI models that compete with flagship offerings from OpenAI — but the ChatGPT maker suspects they were built upon OpenAI data.

DeepSeek built top-performing AI models using less-advanced chips at what it says is a fraction of the cost of rivals such as OpenAI.

OpenAI—which faces multiple lawsuits for using content without permission—accuses DeepSeek of 'distillation,' a technique that use larger models' outputs to improve smaller ones.