OpenAI itself has been accused of building ChatGPT by inappropriately accessing content it didn't have the rights to.

OpenAI said on Wednesday that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's open-source models may have "inappropriately" based its work on the output of OpenAI's models, an OpenAI spokesperson told Axios. Why it matters: China's DeepSeek has taken the AI industry by storm with its R1 reasoning model that competes with OpenAI's o1,

OpenAI claims to have found evidence that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek secretly used data produced by OpenAI’s technology to improve their own AI models, according to the Financial Times. If true, DeepSeek would be in violation of OpenAI’s terms of service. In a statement, the company said it is actively investigating.