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So no, it doesn't belong to OpenAI.
You might be able to sue for penalties for breach of contract of the TOS, but that doesn't give them the right to the model. And even if it doesn't give them any right to invalidate unbound copyright grants they have given to 3rd parties (here literally everyone). Nor does it prevent anyone from training their own new models based on it or prevent anyone from using it. Oh, and the one breaching the TOS might not even have been the company behind DeepSeek but some in-between 3rd party.
Naturally this is under a few assumptions:
- the US consistently applies it's own law, but they have a long history of not doing so
- the US doesn't abuse their power to force their economical opinions (ban DeepSeek) on other countries
- it actually was trained on OpenAI, but uh, OpenAI has IMHO shown over the years very clearly that they can't be trusted and they are fully in-transparent. How do we trust their claim? How do we trust them to not retrospectively have tweaked their model to make it look as if DeepSeek copied it?
The US ruled that the AI cannot be the author, that doesn't lead like so many clickbait articles suggest, that no AI products can be copyrighted.
1 Activist tried to get the US copyright office to acknowledge his LLM as the author, who would then provide him a license to the work.
There was no issue with himself being the original author and copyright holder of the AI works. But thats not what was being challenged.
Prompts, they said, were unlikely enough to satisfy the requirement of a human controlling the expressive elements thus most AI output today is probably not copyrightable.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
Prompts alone.
But there are almost no cases of "Prompts Alone" products seeking copyright.
Even what 3-4 years ago?, AI tools moved into a collaborative footing. Novel AI forces a collaborative process (and gives you output that can demonstrate your input which is nice). ChatGPT effectively forces it due to limited memory.
There was a case, posted here to ycombinator, where a chinese judge upheld "significant" human interaction was involved when a user made 20-odd adjustments to their prompt iterating over produced images and then added a watermark to the result. I would be very surprised if most sensible jurisdictions didn't follow suit.
Midjourney and ChatGPT already include tools to mask and identify parts of the image to be regenerated. And multiple image generators allow dumb stuff like stick figures and so forth to stand in as part of an uploaded image prompt.
And then theres AI voice which is another whole bag of tricks.
>thus most AI output today is probably not copyrightable.
Unless it was worked on even slightly as above. In fact it would be hard to imagine much AI work that isn't copyrightable. Maybe those facebook pages that just prompt "Cyberpunk Girl" and spit out endless variations. But I doubt copyright is at the forefront of their mind.
1 Activist tried to get the US copyright office to acknowledge his LLM as the author, who would then provide him a license to the work.
There was no issue with himself being the original author and copyright holder of the AI works. But that's not what was being challenged.
