A new investment from the Japanese conglomerate would be separate from the $100 billion tied to a project announced at the White House last week.

SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI as part of a broader partnership that could see the Japanese conglomerate spend more than $40 OpenAI is in talks to raise up to $25 billion from SoftBank amid DeepSeek shock.

SoftBank is in talks to invest as much as $25bn into OpenAI, in a deal that would make it the ChatGPT maker’s biggest financial backer, as the pair partner on a huge new artificial intelligence infrastructure project.

OpenAI itself has been accused of building ChatGPT by inappropriately accessing content it didn't have the rights to.

DeepSeek is causing havoc throughout the AI industry. U.S.-based tech companies that have heavily invested in AI saw their stocks take a tumble this week after the China-based startup released a new AI model on par with OpenAI's latest model, yet much cheaper to train — plus, DeepSeek made it free and open source.

OpenAI claims to have found evidence that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek secretly used data produced by OpenAI’s technology to improve their own AI models, according to the Financial Times. If true, DeepSeek would be in violation of OpenAI’s terms of service. In a statement, the company said it is actively investigating.

After spending years indiscriminately ripping off other people's work and getting sued for copyright infringement left and right, OpenAI is trying to pin blame on Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. As the Financial Times reports,

This whole DeepSeek copying ChatGPT accusation from OpenAI and Microsoft reminds me of one thing — people don't care about copycats when they're cheaper and better.