David Sacks, known as Trump’s AI and crypto “czar,” claimed in an interview on Fox that there is “substantial evidence” indicating that Chinese AI company DeepSeek has “distilled” knowledge from OpenAI’s AI models, a process he likened to theft. Sacks, without revealing the source of this evidence, implied that DeepSeek used responses from OpenAI models to train its own AI. “I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about this,” Sacks stated.

DeepSeek, which gained widespread attention this week for its publicly available, high-performance models and free chat apps, is now under close examination by U.S. government officials. According to Reuters, the National Security Council, the U.S. body that offers advice to the president on foreign policy and national security, is assessing the impact of DeepSeek’s apps, which surged to the top of the Apple App Store over the weekend. The U.S. Navy has reportedly prohibited the use of DeepSeek’s AI due to “potential security and ethical concerns.”