Microsoft, an OpenAI technology partner and its largest investor, notified OpenAI of the activity, the people said. Such activity could violate OpenAI’s terms of service or could indicate the group acted to remove OpenAI’s restrictions on how much data they could obtain, the people said.
Microsoft and OpenAI are investigating whether data output from OpenAI’s technology was obtained in an unauthorised manner by a group linked to Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek, according to people familiar with the matter.
Microsoft’s security researchers in the fall observed individuals they believe may be linked to DeepSeek exfiltrating a large amount of data using the OpenAI application programming interface, or API, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential. Software developers can pay for a license to use the API to integrate OpenAI’s proprietary artificial intelligence models into their own applications.
