(Reuters) - ChatGPT creator OpenAI said on Tuesday said that Chinese firms are "constantly" trying to tap into U.S. rivals to improve Chinese artificial intelligence models.

"As the leading builder of AI, we engage in countermeasures to protect our IP, including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models, and believe as we go forward that it is critically important that we are working closely with the U.S. government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology," OpenAI said in a statement.

OpenAI made the comments after the White House said it was evaluating possible national security concerns raised by China's DeepSeek.

David Sacks, the White House's AI and crypto czar, said an AI technique call "distillation" can be used by Chinese firms to learn from U.S. AI leaders.