If China has done to Sam Altman what his OpenAI has been accused of doing to creatives, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh

I once saw an episode of America’s Dumbest Criminals where a man called the cops to report his car stolen, only for it to turn out he’d stolen it from someone else in the first place. I couldn’t help thinking of him this week while watching OpenAI’s Sam Altman wet his pants about the fact that a Chinese hedge fund might have made unauthorised use of his own chatbot models, including ChatGPT, to train its new little side project. This is the cheaper, more open, extremely share-price-slashing DeepSeek.

As news of DeepSeek played havoc with the tech stock market, OpenAI pressed its hanky to its nose and released a statement: “We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more,” this ran. “We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology.” Oooooooooh! I want to say “welcome to America’s Dumbest Tech Barons”, except I can’t, because I think we all know that no law enforcement is coming to get Sam for the stuff he’s alleged to have made unauthorised use of first. That was the good type of alleged theft, whatever the claims of all the lawsuits belatedly trying to claw something back for the alleged copyright victims of his firm’s own inappropriate methods.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist