OpenAI and the White House have implicated DeepSeek of using ChatGPT to inexpensively train its brand-new chatbot.
- Experts in tech law say OpenAI has little recourse under copyright and agreement law.
- OpenAI's terms of usage might use however are mostly unenforceable, they state.
This week, OpenAI and the White House implicated DeepSeek of something similar to theft.

In a flurry of press declarations, they stated the Chinese upstart had actually bombarded OpenAI's chatbots with queries and hoovered up the resulting information trove to rapidly and inexpensively train a design that's now almost as good.

The Trump administration's top AI czar stated this training procedure, called "distilling," totaled up to intellectual property theft. OpenAI, meanwhile, told Business Insider and other outlets that it's investigating whether "DeepSeek might have wrongly distilled our models."

OpenAI is not saying whether the company plans to pursue legal action, rather guaranteeing what a described "aggressive, proactive countermeasures to safeguard our innovation."

But could it? Could it sue DeepSeek on "you stole our content" grounds, similar to the premises OpenAI was itself took legal action against on in a continuous copyright claim submitted in 2023 by The New York Times and other news outlets?

BI presented this question to experts in innovation law, who stated difficult DeepSeek in the courts would be an uphill fight for OpenAI now that the content-appropriation shoe is on the other foot.

OpenAI would have a difficult time proving a copyright or copyright claim, these lawyers stated.

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

That's since it's uncertain whether the responses ChatGPT spits out certify as "creativity," he stated.

"There's a doctrine that says imaginative expression is copyrightable, however truths and concepts are not," Kortz, who teaches at Harvard's Cyberlaw Clinic, stated.

"There's a huge concern in intellectual property law today about whether the outputs of a generative AI can ever constitute imaginative expression or if they are always unguarded facts," he included.

Could OpenAI roll those dice anyhow and declare that its outputs are protected?

That's unlikely, [mariskamast.net](http://mariskamast.net:/smf/index.php?action=profile