Alleged DeepSeek Model Distillation from OpenAI
Date: 2025-01
Affected: OpenAI (GPT-4 / o1 family)
Attack vector: model-extraction
Category: research
Severity: High

In January 2025 OpenAI publicly accused DeepSeek of violating its Terms of Service by performing large-scale model distillation against OpenAI's API to train DeepSeek-V3 / R1. While not formally accepted as a numbered ATLAS case study, the incident is widely cited as a real-world model-extraction attack against a leading commercial LLM.


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):