Top White House advisers this week expressed alarm that China's DeepSeek may have benefited from a method that allegedly piggybacks off the advances of US rivals called "distillation."

Top White House advisers this week expressed alarm that China's DeepSeek may have benefited from a method that allegedly piggybacks off the advances of U.S. rivals called "distillation." The technique,

SINGAPORE—The unexpected success of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has revealed cracks in U.S. efforts to contain China’s technology ambitions, challenging both Washington and Silicon Valley to rethink how best to preserve American supremacy.

Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek disrupted Silicon Valley with the release of cheaply developed AI models that compete with flagship offerings from OpenAI — but the ChatGPT maker suspects they were built upon OpenAI data.

Experts say AI model distillation is likely widespread and hard to detect, but DeepSeek has not admitted to using it on its full models.

DeepSeek built top-performing AI models using less-advanced chips at what it says is a fraction of the cost of rivals such as OpenAI.