OpenAI's claim that DeepSeek trained on its outputs is narrative management: other startups bootstrapped exactly that way and were never banned for it.

I think that they're trying to shift the narrative. They're trying to protect themselves. We saw this years ago when ByteDance was actually banned from some OpenAI APIs for training on outputs. There's other AI startups that most people, if you're in the AI culture, were like they just told us they trained on OpenAI outputs and they never got banned.