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In a very unexpected development Denmark is now working directly with Russia's Gazprom to do environmental mitigation on the damaged Nord Stream pipelines, in the wake of the multiple underwater blasts that took them offline on September 26, 2022 - leading to years of accusations against Moscow and a Russia-West tit-for-tat.

Denmark's energy agency has granted Nord Stream 2 AG (which is under Gazprom) permission to engage in preservation work on Nord Stream 2 in the Baltic Sea. The agency described that there remain serious safety risks after the natural gas pipeline was filled with seawater and the remnants of natural gas.

"The work aims to preserve the damaged pipeline by installing customized plugs at each of the open pipe ends to prevent further gas blow-out and the introduction of oxygenated seawater," Denmark's energy agency said.

The $11 billion pipeline project to pump Russian gas to Germany was hugely contentious for years, with Washington opposing it, before it was blown up in a 'mysterious' sabotage operation.

The Western mainstream media has since backed off its repeat accusations that Moscow must have blown up its own vital pipeline, in light of revelations and a recent consensus that it was either a team of Ukrainian specialists on a 'rogue' yacht or else a major CIA op with help from the US Navy.

While Scandinavian countries were once leading the accusations and investigations against Moscow related to the sabotage, suddenly Denmark appears to be working with 'pariah' Russia. All of this is happening as Washington still has far-reaching sanctions on Russia as well as the NS2 Russian operator, Gazprom's Nord Stream 2 AG.

"The damaged line of NS2 is estimated to still contain approximately 9-10 million cubic meters of natural gas, while the intact line remains filled with gas, the Danish agency said," Reuters notes. "The United States in December issued further sanctions on the operator and other Russian entities saying it considers Nord Stream 2 a Russian geopolitical project and opposes efforts to revive it," the report adds.

This has raised the crucial question of whether the Russian entity's supposed environmental mitigation efforts are but cover to eventually revive the controversial project.

This brings up other questions of context and timing. After all, the Danish government is currently locked in a very public battle and war of words with the new Trump administration over Greenland's sovereignty. Is the tiny NATO country of Denmark in search of any and all possible leverage?

From close US ally to lashing out...

And given the Ukraine war increasingly seems unwinnable from the Western perspective, is it time for a European reset vis-a-vis Russia and its heavily relied upon natural gas?

The following hit Politico on Tuesday:

France has discussed with Denmark sending troops to Greenland in response to United States President Donald Trump's repeated threats to annex the Danish territory, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said.

Asked about calls to send EU troops to Greenland, Barrot said in an interview with France's Sud Radio that France had “started discussing [troop deployment] with Denmark,” but that it was not “Denmark’s wish” to proceed with the idea.

Barrot's comments came as Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was in the middle of a lightning tour of European capitals to drum up support from allies in dealing with Trump.

Essentially, at the very moment Denmark is trying to "drum up support" within Europe to stand up to Trump, the Danish government goes from condemning Russia's sanctioned Gazprom to working with it and authorizing it to do work on NS2.

But likely there will be a shrug from the White House, given the current broader context is Trump is trying to get Moscow to the negotiating table in hopes of quickly winding down the Ukraine war.

But the Trump administration also has some clear interests of its own related to the ongoing NS2 saga and whodunnit 'mystery', as the above demonstrates.

OpenAI says it has evidence China’s DeepSeek used its model to train competitor

White House AI tsar David Sacks raises possibility of alleged intellectual property theft

OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property.

The San Francisco-based ChatGPT maker told the Financial Times it had seen some evidence of “distillation”, which it suspects to be from DeepSeek.

The technique is used by developers to obtain better performance on smaller models by using outputs from larger, more capable ones, allowing them to achieve similar results on specific tasks at a much lower cost.

Distillation is a common practice in the industry but the concern was that DeepSeek may be doing it to build its own rival model, which is a breach of OpenAI’s terms of service.

“The issue is when you [take it out of the platform and] are doing it to create your own model for your own purposes,” said one person close to OpenAI.

OpenAI declined to comment further or provide details of its evidence. Its terms of service state users cannot “copy” any of its services or “use output to develop models that compete with OpenAI”.

DeepSeek’s release of its R1 reasoning model has surprised markets, as well as investors and technology companies in Silicon Valley. Its built-on-a-shoestring models have attained high rankings and comparable results to leading US models.

Shares in Nvidia fell 17 per cent on Monday, wiping $589bn off its market value, on fears that big investments in its expensive AI hardware might not be needed. They recovered by 9 per cent on Tuesday, along with other tech stocks.

OpenAI and its partner Microsoft investigated accounts believed to be DeepSeek’s last year that were using OpenAI’s application programming interface (API) and blocked their access on suspicion of distillation that violated the terms of service, another person with direct knowledge said. These investigations were first reported by Bloomberg.

Microsoft declined to comment and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this detail. DeepSeek did not respond to a request for comment made during the lunar new year holiday.

Earlier, President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto tsar David Sacks said “it is possible” that IP theft had occurred.

“There’s a technique in AI called distillation . . . when one model learns from another model [and] kind of sucks the knowledge out of the parent model,” Sacks told Fox News on Tuesday.

“And there’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI models, and I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about this,” Sacks added, although he did not provide evidence.

DeepSeek said it used just 2,048 Nvidia H800 graphics cards and spent $5.6mn to train its V3 model with 671bn parameters, a fraction of what OpenAI and Google spent to train comparably sized models. Some experts said the model generated responses that indicated it had been trained on outputs from OpenAI’s GPT-4, which would violate its terms of service. 

Industry insiders say that it is common practice for AI labs in China and the US to use outputs from companies such as OpenAI, which have invested in hiring people to teach their models how to produce responses that sound more human. This is expensive and labour-intensive, and smaller players often piggyback off this work, say the insiders.

“It is a very common practice for start-ups and academics to use outputs from human-aligned commercial LLMs, like ChatGPT, to train another model,” said Ritwik Gupta, a PhD candidate in AI at the University of California, Berkeley.

“That means you get this human feedback step for free. It is not surprising to me that DeepSeek supposedly would be doing the same. If they were, stopping this practice precisely may be difficult,” he added.

The practice highlights the difficulty for companies keen to protect their technical edge. “We know [China]-based companies — and others — are constantly trying to distil the models of leading US AI companies,” OpenAI said in its latest statement.

It added: “We engage in countermeasures to protect our IP, including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models, and believe . . . it is critically important that we are working closely with the US government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology.”

OpenAI is battling allegations of its own copyright infringement from newspapers and content creators, including lawsuits from The New York Times and prominent authors, who accuse the company of training its models on their articles and books without permission.

Jacquemus Has Found His New CEO: Sources

Sarah Benady, currently president of Celine North America, is expected to take up the role.

Jacquemus, on the cusp of an international retail expansion, has tapped Celine North America president Sarah Benady as its next chief executive officer, WWD has learned.

According to market sources, Benady is poised to fill a role vacant since Bastien Daguzan stepped down in December 2023.

Benady has been at the helm of Celine’s North American operations for nearly four years, and also boasts experience in the affordable luxury space, where designer Simon Porte Jacquemus has found his niche.

Before Celine, she logged four years as North American president of French fashion chain Ba&sh. Before that, she spent six years at French fashion chain The Kooples, first as international director and then president, according to her LinkedIn profile.

A graduate of French business school HEC, Benady started her career as a project manager at French department store Printemps.

Jacquemus recently opened freestanding stores in London and New York, as the brand seeks to grow its direct-to-consumer sales, and tell his brand story in physical spaces.

The Paris-based company, founded and owned by the designer, has confirmed it is seeking a minority investor to fund its ongoing retail growth and expansion into beauty.

It is looking for additional funds for its next phase of store openings in 2025 and 2026, and to help it explore the new category, the company has indicated.

Simon Porte Jacquemus has been doing double duty as creative director and CEO since the departure of Daguzan, who went on to join Fear of God in Los Angeles.

Benady and Jacquemus officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

“Chanel is not just black and white,” said fashion head Bruno Pavlovsky.

Guests walking into the Grand Palais for the Chanel haute couture show on Tuesday were greeted by two imposing white ramps curving toward the soaring steel-and-glass ceiling.

Backstage before the show, monitors revealed an aerial view of the set by buzzy interior designer Willo Perron, with the runway forming a cross between the label’s double-C logo and the infinity symbol. What better way to signal continuity at the house as it prepares to welcome its new creative director Matthieu Blazy in April?

“We’re celebrating the 110th anniversary of couture at Chanel. We had to mark the occasion,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and president of Chanel SAS. “The symbol means it is constantly changing and evolving, and it never ends.”

Ahead of the event, the brand released a short film featuring model Lulu Tenney getting fitted for her finale bridal look, and friends of the house Vanessa Paradis, Marion Cotillard, Naomi Campbell and Anna Mouglalis talking about what makes couture so special.

The spring collection, designed by the studio team, explored the hidden facets of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s color palette. “Chanel is not just black and white,” Pavlovsky stressed.

The lineup began with a sequence of white looks before working through the chromatic circle, from sunrise pastels to primary hues. With a passage through midnight blue and black, it completed the sequence from day to night.

Chanel’s signature tweed suits were jazzed up with linings in saturated green, yellow, royal blue or purple satin, and trimmed with multicolored braids and precious buttons. Short skirts, some layered with sheer tulle or extending into frothy trains, gave the lineup a youthful appeal.

While models’ red lips popped against striking looks like a scarlet evening gown, the softer shades felt more familiar, recalling the 18th-century sugared almond hues that endlessly inspired Karl Lagerfeld during his three-decade tenure at the helm of the house.

Baby pink, blue and gold were dabbed in watercolor stains on a floral-print trouser suit embroidered with translucent petals, while tiny feathers appeared as frothy accents on looks including a pink and green chiffon slipdress and a black lace evening gown.

Some of the most striking styles were also the simplest: Alex Consani looking statuesque in a pale yellow double satin shirtdress with rhinestone buttons, or Steinberg sweeping past in an ice blue satin cape.

While the collection stuck to safe territory by mining the archives, it felt solid enough to tide over the house until Blazy shows his first collection in October. In the meantime, Chanel has seen no drop-off in demand for its top-end collections, although overall sales missed expectations amid a global slowdown in luxury sales, Pavlovsky said.

“Our haute couture workshops are running at full steam and we continue to recruit,” the executive reported.

However, he confirmed media reports that Chanel is cutting its headcount in the U.S. in response to slowing growth, but said the net figure was below the 70 jobs reported.

“For the full year, revenues were flat in 2024 versus 2023,” Pavlovsky said. “We’re starting on a strong footing in 2025, but we’re having to readjust to take into account the shortfall.”

He stressed that Chanel’s revenues have doubled since 2019, and expressed confidence that the luxury sector will bounce back after the current trough. In Chanel’s case, Blazy will carry much of that responsibility, though the power of the brand — telegraphed by that monumental show set — provides strong momentum.

“When times are tough, that is the time for brands to refocus on their fundamentals,” Pavlovsky said.