OpenAI itself has been accused of building ChatGPT by inappropriately accessing content it didn't have the rights to.

OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor. The San Francisco-based ChatGPT maker told the FT it had seen some evidence of “distillation”,

The DeepSeek chatbot, known as R1, responds to user queries just like its U.S.-based counterparts. Early testing released by DeepSeek suggests that its quality rivals that of other AI products, while the company says it costs less and uses far fewer specialized chips than do its competitors.