OpenAI, the AI startup behind ChatGPT, has ‘overhauled’ its security operations to protect intellectual property from corporate espionage, the Financial Times reported on July 8. 

The development took place after the company claimed that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek had copied its models using distillation techniques. The report noted that OpenAI is implementing tighter restrictions on sensitive data and strengthening staff vetting processes. 

The company’s policies, referred to as information ‘tenting’, have limited the number of personnel who can access the new algorithms being developed at OpenAI, according to insiders quoted by FT. Besides, employees are only permitted to enter certain rooms by scanning their fingerprints. 

OpenAI safeguards its model weights by implementing a ‘deny-by-default egress policy, ‘ which means that no connections to the internet are permitted unless they are explicitly authorised. In addition, the company has also increased physical security at its data centres. 

Earlier this year, Microsoft security researchers believed that individuals potentially connected to DeepSeek are ‘exfiltrating a significant amount of data’ through OpenAI’s API, as per a report by Bloomberg. 

Furthermore, OpenAI also told FT that it had seen “some evidence of distillation”, which is a technique to improve the performance of an AI model by using outputs from another one.

In April, Business Insider reported that OpenAI required developers seeking access to the company’s advanced AI models to verify their identity with a government ID. 

China’s DeepSeek, a subsidiary of HighFlyer, launched the R1 reasoning model a few months ago. It generated significant industry buzz by being open source and providing capabilities comparable to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model, but at a fraction of the training cost. Since then, there has been a lot of buzz around the threat that models from China potentially pose.

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