Sam Altman admits China’s DeepSeek forced OpenAI’s hand on open models: ‘If we didn’t do it…’

OpenAI released its first open weight models since GPT-2 earlier this month with the promise of delivering strong real world performance at low cost. With China's DeepSeek shaking up the AI industry at the start of this year with open source models, it was abundantly clear why OpenAI didn't want to be on the ‘wrong side of history’. 
Perhaps for the first time since launch of GPT-OSS models, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talked about the big China factor behind the release of open-weight models. 

In an interaction with CNBC, Altman admitted that competition from open source models like DeepSeek was a big factor behind OpenAI's decision to release its open-weight models. 

"It was clear that if we didn't do it, the world was gonna head to be mostly built on Chinese open source models," Altman told the publication.

“That was a factor in our decision, for sure. Wasn't the only one, but that loomed large” he added

Altman also talked about the US policy of restricting the export of powerful semiconductors to China, stating, "My instinct is that doesn't work," he said.

"You can export-control one thing, but maybe not the right thing… maybe people build fabs or find other workarounds," he added

DeepSeek was not alone, however, many other Chinese companies had been gaining prominence in the tech circles due to their open weights models. Alibaba's Qwen for instance has been releasing its latest foundation models under the Apache 2.0 license. Meanwhile, Meta has already been shippng its Llama models uner community licenses while also adding these models directly on its social media platforms. 

Meanwhile, OpenAI also released its latest GPT-5 model this month with claimed improvements in accuracy, reasoning, coding, health, writing and multi-modal abilities. The new model also led to the deprecation 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.