SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $25 billion into ChatGPT owner OpenAI and become the AI firm's largest financial backer, the Financial Times reported, as the Japanese conglomerate continues to expand into the sector.

OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor. The San Francisco-based ChatGPT maker told the FT it had seen some evidence of “distillation”,