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.

KEY TAKEAWAYS Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft and OpenAI are investigating whether a group linked to Chinese startup DeepSeek used improperly obtained data from the American AI company to launch the low-cost AI model that sparked a selloff Monday.

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.