Just to play devil's advocate, OAI can argue that they spent great effort creating and procuring annotated data. Such datasets are indeed their secret, and now DS gets them for free by distilling OAI's output. Besides, OAI's EULA explicitly forbids users from using the output of their API for model training. I'm not saying that OAI is right, of course. Just to present OAI's point of view.
This is an incomplete version of OpenAI’s point of view.
OpenAI has a legally submitted point of view that they believe the benefits of AI to humanity are so great that anyone creating AI should be allowed to trample all over copyright laws, Terms of Use, EULAs, etc.
But OpenAI’s version of benefit to humanity is that they should be allowed to trample over those laws so they can benefit humanity by closely guarding the output of trampling those laws and charging humanity an access fee.
Even if we accept all of OpenAI’s criticisms of DeepSeek, they’re arguing that DeepSeek doing the exact same thing, but releasing the output for free for anyone to use is somehow less beneficial to humanity.
This goes back to my previous criticism of OAI: Stratechery said that Altman's greatest crime is to seek regulatory capture. I think it's spot on. Altman portrays himself as a visionary leader, a messiah of the AI age. Yet when the company was so small and that the progress in AI just got started, his strategic move was to suffocate innovation in the name of AI safety. For that, I question his vision, motive, and leadership.
Feist comprehensively rejected that argument under US copyright law, and the attempts in the late 90s to pass a law in response establishing a sui generis prohibition on copying databases also failed in the US. The EU did adopt a directive to that effect, which may be why there are no significant European search engines.
However, OpenAI and Google are far more politically influential than the lobbyists in the 90s, so it is likely to succeed.
