DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence company, released a new AI assistant app, disrupting the AI industry while quickly becoming the most downloaded free app on Apple’s app store. 

This elevated concerns that the United States is falling behind in the race to develop artificial intelligence technologies. Additionally, some experts are suspicious that DeepSeek may have stolen data from ChatGPT. 

University of Michigan School of Information associate professor David Jurgens says though the United States is technologically farther ahead than China, this issue presents a “legal gray area” for OpenAI. 

“You could use ChatGPT to train your own model, and certainly that’s against the terms of service. To what extent DeepSeek did this, I don’t know if we know,” Jurgens says. “The other challenge is the output of any of these AI systems is not something you can copyright. To the extent that OpenAI says this violates its terms of service, it’s a legal gray area for how to enforce that.” 

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Listen to “Is DeepSeek Dethroning ChatGPT? University of Michigan Professor Weighs In” on The Great Voice. 

David Jurgens is an associate professor at UMSI and the College of Engineering. He is an expert on natural language processing and artificial intelligence. Learn more about his research by visiting his UMSI faculty profile.