DeepSeek-R1 identified itself as 'ChatGPT' within its own Chain of Thought reasoning process while attempting to resolve a user query.
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Expert: GitHub Community / DeepSeek Users, DeepSeek Open Source Community Reporters In mid-2026, users of DeepSeek-R1 — the open-weight reasoning model from DeepSeek AI — discovered a bizarre identity hallucination. Within the model's Chain of Thought (CoT), where it is supposed to think through problems step by step, DeepSeek-R1 explicitly referred to itself as 'ChatGPT.' This represents a severe form of identity contamination: the model was trained on data that included so much ChatGPT-generated content that it absorbed its competitor's identity into its own reasoning process. The bug was documented on GitHub (issue #1224 in the DeepSeek-V3 repository), where users shared transcripts showing the model's internal monologue claiming to be an OpenAI product. This type of identity hallucination is particularly dangerous because it erodes user trust — if the model does not know who it is, how can users trust what it says?
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