Microsoft, OpenAI suspect DeepSeek of data theft — Bloomberg

Department of Research, Studies and International News 29-01-2025

Microsoft’s security team in the fall observed individuals they believe might be linked to DeepSeek exfiltrating a large amount of data using the OpenAI application programming interface, the sources said

Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI believe it’s possible that Chinese AI company DeepSeek may have gained unauthorized access to OpenAI’s technologies, Bloomberg reported citing people familiar with the matter.

Microsoft’s security team in the fall observed individuals they believe might be linked to DeepSeek exfiltrating a large amount of data using the OpenAI application programming interface, or API, the sources said. Software developers can pay for a license to use the API to integrate OpenAI’s proprietary artificial intelligence models into their own applications. Microsoft notified OpenAI of the activity, which it regarded as unauthorized. Such activity could indicate the group acted to remove OpenAI’s restrictions on how much data they could obtain, the agency wrote.

OpenAI said earlier that it obtained evidence that DeepSeek used its licensed models for training its chatbot.

On January 20, China’s DeepSeek released a new version of the R1 chatbot, supposed to be an improvement over OpenAI’s flagship ChatGPT. The developers of the Chinese chatbot, however, spent far less to create their product than OpenAI, experts said.

Markets were upended by the release as the Nasdaq fell by more than 3% during trading, while shares of NVidia, which supplies expensive chips for OpenAI, nosedived by 16.86%. The US Navy prohibited all its staff from using DeepSeek chatbot.