OpenAI's statement came after Chinese startup DeepSeek sparked panic on Wall Street this week with its powerful new chatbot developed at a fraction of the cost of its US competitors.

Deepseek's performance has sparked a wave of accusations that it has reverse engineered the capabilities of leading US technology, such as the AI powering ChatGPT.

OpenAI said rivals were using a process known as distillation in which developers creating smaller models learn from larger ones by copying their behavior and decision-making patterns, similar to a student learning from a teacher.

"We know (China) based companies -- and others -- are constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies," an OpenAI spokesperson told AFP, highlighting tensions over AI intellectual property protection between the United States and China.

We "believe as we go forward that it is critically important that we are working closely with the US government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology."

David Sacks, the new Trump administration's AI Czar, told Fox News there was "substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI's models."

OpenAI said the process was against its term of service and would work at detecting and preventing further attempts.

The company led by Sam Altman is itself facing multiple intellectual property violation accusations globally, primarily related to the use of copyrighted materials in training its generative AI models.