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1 OpenAI has Little Legal Recourse against DeepSeek, Tech Law Experts Say

OpenAI and the White House have actually accused DeepSeek of using ChatGPT to cheaply train its .
- Experts in tech law say OpenAI has little option under intellectual residential or commercial property and agreement law.
- OpenAI's regards to use might use however are mostly unenforceable, asteroidsathome.net they say.
Today, OpenAI and the White House implicated DeepSeek of something akin to theft.

In a flurry of press statements, they stated the Chinese upstart had actually bombarded OpenAI's chatbots with queries and hoovered up the resulting information trove to rapidly and cheaply train a model that's now practically as excellent.

The Trump administration's leading AI czar said this training process, called "distilling," amounted to copyright theft. OpenAI, meanwhile, told Business Insider and other outlets that it's investigating whether "DeepSeek may have wrongly distilled our designs."

OpenAI is not stating whether the business prepares to pursue legal action, rather promising what a spokesperson termed "aggressive, proactive countermeasures to safeguard our innovation."

But could it? Could it take legal action against DeepSeek on "you stole our material" grounds, just like the premises OpenAI was itself sued on in a continuous copyright claim filed in 2023 by The New York Times and other news outlets?

BI postured this question to specialists in technology law, who said challenging 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 hard time showing a copyright or copyright claim, these legal representatives said.

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

That's because it's unclear whether the answers ChatGPT spits out certify as "imagination," he said.

"There's a teaching that states imaginative expression is copyrightable, but realities and ideas are not," Kortz, who teaches at Harvard's Cyberlaw Clinic, stated.

"There's a huge question in intellectual home law right now about whether the outputs of a generative AI can ever constitute imaginative expression or if they are necessarily vulnerable realities," he added.

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

That's not likely, the legal representatives said.

OpenAI is already on the record in The New York Times' copyright case arguing that training AI is an allowed "reasonable use" exception to copyright protection.

If they do a 180 and inform DeepSeek that training is not a fair use, "that might return to sort of bite them," Kortz said. "DeepSeek could say, 'Hey, weren't you just stating that training is reasonable usage?'"

There may be a distinction between the Times and DeepSeek cases, Kortz included.

"Maybe it's more transformative to turn news posts into a model" - as the Times implicates OpenAI of doing - "than it is to turn outputs of a model into another design," as DeepSeek is said to have actually done, Kortz stated.

"But this still puts OpenAI in a pretty predicament with regard to the line it's been toeing regarding reasonable use," he added.

A breach-of-contract lawsuit is more likely

A breach-of-contract lawsuit is much likelier than an IP-based suit, though it comes with its own set of issues, wiki.fablabbcn.org said Anupam Chander, who teaches innovation law at Georgetown University.

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The terms of service for Big Tech chatbots like those developed by OpenAI and Anthropic forbid using their content as training fodder for a completing AI design.

"So possibly that's the claim you might possibly bring - a contract-based claim, not an IP-based claim," Chander said.

"Not, 'You copied something from me,' however that you took advantage of my model to do something that you were not allowed to do under our agreement."

There might be a drawback, Chander and Kortz said. OpenAI's terms of service require that the majority of claims be resolved through arbitration, not lawsuits. There's an exception for lawsuits "to stop unapproved use or abuse of the Services or intellectual home infringement or misappropriation."

There's a larger hitch, [mariskamast.net](http://mariskamast.net:/smf/index.php?action=profile