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Your editorialized headline is false, misleading and technically not possible with only api access.

The headline may be false, but it accurately reflects the article.

The outlet’s sources said Microsoft security researchers detected that large amounts of data were being exfiltrated through OpenAI developer accounts in late 2024, which the company believes are affiliated with DeepSeek. OpenAI told the Financial Times that it found evidence linking DeepSeek to the use of distillation (...)

In fact, it is exactly the point of the article that more access was used than is provided in the API. Distillation is not possible with API access.

If OpenAI says they walked away with the weights this is a possibility but it doesn't look like they have so it can't be a distill.

To distill a neural net the only thing you need is access to the softmax probabilities. You don’t need the weights. This is entirely consistent with the story—-large anounts of data being exfiltrated, not weights but the raw output before sampling.

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