Microsoft stressing out over DeepSeek's success that it's investigating the Chinese company

The rise of DeepSeek sparked so much worry and anxiety in the US tech market. And now, Microsoft and OpenAI are investigating whether the Chinese AI company improperly accessed OpenAI’s technology data through its API.

Bloomberg first learned that the Redmond tech giant’s security team noticed suspicious activity in the fall, where individuals appeared to exfiltrate large amounts of data. If that’s true, it violates OpenAI’s terms of service.

There are also claims that DeepSeek may have used OpenAI’s model outputs to develop its own technology.

DeepSeek, which recently launched an AI model called R1, has been seen as a growing threat to US-based tech firms due to its AI’s competitive performance, especially for claims that it’s built the AI using older Nvidia H100 GPUs and only $6 million.

OpenAI has recently launched ChatGPT Gov, a special version of ChatGPT for US government agencies to maintain “America’s global leadership in AI.” This version is available for deployment in both commercial and government Azure cloud environments after a chaotic 24 hours from DeepSeek’s rise that caused over $1 trillion lost from the US stock market.

Higher-ups over at Redmond and OpenAI have also been sending praise for DeepSeek’s cost-efficiency. It caught the eyes of Microsoft executives like Satya Nadella and Mustafa Suleyman.

While DeepSeek claims to have achieved this with innovative scaling techniques, there are suspicions that it may have reverse-engineered open-source models from Meta.

Or, it might have used subsidized hardware from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which explains why the chatbot is so adamant in answering prompts about what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 or other sensitive topics.