Sam Altman admits that China's Deepseeek forced Openai's hand on open models: "If we didn't ..."

Openai released its first openweight models since GPT-2 earlier this month, which promised strong real performance at low cost. With China’s Deepseek shaking the AI industry through Open Source releases earlier this year, it became clear why Openai didn’t want to be on what CEO Sam Altman calls the ‘wrong side of history’. For the first time since the launch of its GPT OSS models, Altman has openly acknowledged the ‘China factor’ behind the move. In an interaction with CNBC, Altman acknowledged that competition from Chinese Open Source models like Deepseek played a big role in Openai’s decision. “It was clear that if we didn’t, the world would go to be built mostly on Chinese Open Source models,” Altman told the publication. “It was a factor in our decision, was certainly not the only one, but it grew up.” He added that Altman also talked about US policy to limit the export of mighty semiconductors to China, saying, “My instinct is that it doesn’t work,” he said. “You can do one thing, but maybe not the right thing … maybe people are building fabs or find other solutions,” he added that Deepseek was not alone, but many other Chinese businesses received prominence in the technical circles because of their openweight models. For example, Alibaba’s Qwen released its latest foundation models under the Apache 2.0 license. Meanwhile, Meta already had his Llama models Uner community licenses, while also adding these models directly on his social media platforms. Earlier in the year, the growing popularity of Deepseeek’s AI models crushed all ideas of US supremacy in the AI race as the chatbot showed achievements, similar to competitive models of Openai and Google, despite being developed at a fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, Openai has also released its latest GPT-5 model this month with alleged improvements in accuracy, reasoning, coding, health, writing and multimodal abilities. The new model has also led to the depreciation of older GPT and O series models for free users, while the Pro, Plus, Team and Enterprise users still have access to the older models.