Rio de Janeiro Built an AI Model That Beat DeepSeek—But Was Based on Someone Else's Work

The city of Rio de Janeiro recently promoted an AI model intended for administrative tasks, claiming it outperformed established systems like DeepSeek in specific benchmarks. Investigations revealed that the model was largely built upon existing open-source technology without providing the required attribution to the original developers. This incident highlights the growing challenges of transparency and intellectual property compliance as local governments increasingly adopt and rebrand generative AI tools.