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 ChatGPT owner OpenAI, according to a person familiar with the matter, as the Japanese conglomerate continues to expand into the sector. SoftBank could invest $15 billion to $25 billion directly into Microsoft-backed OpenAI,

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

OpenAI believes DeepSeek used a process called “distillation,” which helps make smaller AI models perform better by learning from larger ones.