Editions
Los 40 USA
Scores
Follow us on
Hello

AI

Is DeepSeek secure for US users? This is what the experts say about the new Chinese AI

China’s AI startup DeepSeek rocked the U.S. market this week, and now the Trump administration as well as cybersecurity experts have expressed concern.

China’s AI startup DeepSeek rocked the U.S. market this week, and now the Trump administration as well as cybersecurity experts have expressed concern.
Dado RuvicREUTERS

DeepSeek, China’s AI startup based in Hangzhou, quickly became the most downloaded free application in the United States on Monday after it was launched. Besides disrupting Wall Street with its sudden emergence, the Trump administration as well as cybersecurity experts and lawmakers have now expressed concerns over the same potential national security threats that led to a ban on TikTok.

The security concerns over DeepSeek in U.S.

President Trump labeled the sudden explosive debut of DeepSeek, which caused Nvidia shares to plummet, as a “wake-up” call for America to be the leader in low-cost, functional, artificial intelligence apps.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed Trump’s sentiments, saying that the administration will seek to “ensure American AI dominance”. Leavitt also said the National Security Council (NSC) would examine the potential national security threats around DeepSeek.

“At the President’s direction, the NSC and others in the U.S. government work in many ways to address concerns involving AI, China, and data security,” agency spokesperson Brian Hughes said. “As the President has underscored, U.S. policy is to ensure that the United States leads the world in AI.”

Because DeepSeek stores its troves of U.S. user data in China, Ross Burley, co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Information Resilience, warned that the app’s emergence in the U.S. could raise data security and privacy issues for its users.

“More and more people will use it, and that will open the door to more and more personal data just being given away to the [Chinese Communist Party] and being sent basically to mainland China to be able to inform them of their activities,” Burley said.

“What they’ll use it for is behavior change campaigns, disinformation campaigns, for really targeted messaging as to what Western audiences like, what they do,” he said.

According to Financial Times, OpenAI has found evidence that DeepSeek used the American company‘s models to train their own open-source competitor. They said they’d found evidence of “distillation”, which they suspect came from DeepSeek.

“As the leading builder of AI, we engage in countermeasures to protect our [intellectual property]... and believe as we go forward that it is critically important that we are working closely with the U.S. government to best protect the most capable models,” OpenAI said in a statement.

DeepSeek’s privacy policy states that it collects information from users (including “device model, operating system, keystroke patterns or rhythms, IP address, and system language”) and stores it “on secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China“.

Will the U.S. ban DeepSeek?

As they did with TikTok, the U.S. could potentially ban DeepSeek. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, moved its U.S. data to Oracle, an American-owned software company in an effort to mitigate concerns. Although Trump has put a pause on the ban of TikTok, the legislation grants the federal government the ability to crack down on tech platforms owned by countries regarded as U.S. adversaries, like China.

Under the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”, the U.S. Congress can force a platform to divest its U.S. operations from foreign operations and, if it qualifies as a threat, it can be banned.

According to Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, however, DeepSeek is potentially less threatening than TikTok as it is an open-source large language model.

“[A] lot of these open-source apps, open-source models, you can actually sort of use them directly on other platforms,” said Sheehan. “Perplexity is a major U.S. AI company, and they’re currently using a version of DeepSeek that you can use that doesn’t have the data privacy or security threats.”

Get your game on! Whether you’re into NFL touchdowns, NBA buzzer-beaters, world-class soccer goals, or MLB home runs, our app has it all. Dive into live coverage, expert insights, breaking news, exclusive videos, and more – plus, stay updated on the latest in current affairs and entertainment. Download now for all-access coverage, right at your fingertips – anytime, anywhere.

Rules