Summary:
The launch of Chinese AI application DeepSeek in the U.S. has raised national security concerns among officials, lawmakers, and cybersecurity experts. The app quickly became the most downloaded on Apple’s store, disrupting Wall Street and causing a record 17% drop in Nvidia’s stock. The White House announced an investigation into the potential risks, with some lawmakers calling for stricter export controls to prevent China from leveraging U.S. technology.
Beyond economic impact, experts warn DeepSeek may pose significant data security risks, as Chinese law allows government access to company-held data. Unlike TikTok, which stores U.S. data on Oracle servers, DeepSeek operates directly from China, collecting personal user information. The app also exhibits censorship, blocking content on politically sensitive topics like Tiananmen Square. Some analysts argue that, as an open-source model, DeepSeek may not be as concerning as TikTok, but critics worry its widespread adoption could advance China’s influence through curated information control.
It’s open source so why not just take the best parts of it and run it themselves if it is such a worry instead of relying on their app and website.
They’re pissy cause it being open source and more efficient means that it’s gonna be more cost effective for people to use. Which is real bad if your company overcommitted to the slop and needs to recover losses.
it’s not fully open source. it comes with binary blobs you can’t build from the source
This.
I can easily see the national security argument for people sending queries to CCP-controlled servers (unfortunately people put all kinds of sensitive information into prompts).
Whether people like it or not, that is potentially risky. I don’t know if China has blocked OpenAI-hosted stuff, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they have for similar reasons. If they haven’t, they should consider it.
But attempting any bans the model itself, even when ran locally, would be conclusive evidence that they’re doing it just to harm a competitor.