1 week ago
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A temporary ban on employees using DeepSeek on their devices has been announced by the South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy,
citing security concerns.
Taiwan and Australia have also banned the chatbot on government devices, and the US Congress is considering a bill to enact a similar ban.
Meanwhile, Italy’s data protection agency has ordered DeepSeek to restrict the processing of Italian users’ data until more information regarding its management is available.
DeepSeek burst into the limelight last month when it announced that it had developed its chatbot at a tiny fraction of the cost of models created by tech giants such as Google and OpenAI.
R1’s development team reported in a research article that they had spent less than $6 million on processing power to train the chatbot,
whereas DeepSeek’s Silicon Valley competitors have invested billions of dollars in their AI models.
Almost immediately after the announcement, existential concerns were expressed over Silicon Valley’s strategy of heavily investing in artificial intelligence.
In a single day last month, investors who were worried about DeepSeek’s impact on the AI sector depleted the market value of the so-called “Magnificent Seven” IT companies by around $1 trillion.
DeepSeek’s claim of operating on a shoestring budget has been contested by several critics, who contend that the start-up most certainly had access to more sophisticated chips and more capital than it has admitted.
The data protection agency also added in a statement that DeepSeek was cooperating with them and “acknowledged that considerations for domestic privacy laws were somewhat lacking.”
Authorities said this will take time which was why they were temporarily suspending the app in the country.
The app was removed from local app stores on Saturday and the South Korean version of the Apple store on Monday. Users who had already downloaded DeepSeek were still able to use the app.
Seoul asked existing users to use the app with extreme caution until it was made compliant with local laws.
However,those who have already downloaded the app can still use the chatbot.
“To prevent further concerns from spreading, the commission recommended that DeepSeek temporarily suspend its service while making the necessary improvements,” the commission said, adding that bringing the app in line with local regulations would “inevitably take a significant amount of time”.
English (US) ·