Well, well, well—look who suddenly wants a word with the sheriff in the fair-use Wild West landscape of artificial intelligence.

As Bloomberg first reported, Microsoft and its partner company OpenAI are investigating the white-hot Chinese startup DeepSeek after Microsoft security researchers allegedly discovered people linked to DeepSeek withdrawing large amounts of data through the company’s API last fall. Elsewhere, White House AI czar David Sacks told Fox News on Tuesday that there is “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek “distilled” knowledge from OpenAI’s AI models.

These allegations align with other suspicious aspects of the new AI. For instance, when a Fast Company editor took DeepSeek for a test run earlier this week, the chatbot insisted it was made by Microsoft.

Perhaps the Chinese company—which built its new model in a matter of months with shockingly little funding and computing power—violated the law by using OpenAI’s output to develop its tech. Or maybe it operated entirely within a legal gray area. Either way, it’s ironic that a company whose entire business model........

© Fast Company