OpenAI Warns Congress That DeepSeek Is Distilling US AI Models to Gain Competitive Edge

Summary

On February 12, 2026, OpenAI submitted a memo to the U.S. House Select Committee on China accusing DeepSeek of "ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs." The memo alleges that DeepSeek employees used distillation techniques — a process where a smaller model is trained on the outputs of a more powerful one to replicate its capabilities — to extract value from US frontier models without bearing the R&D costs. Specifically, OpenAI stated it h