The rapid rise of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI application, has triggered alarm bells in the US, raising concerns about national security and data privacy. The app's open-source nature and accessibility to American users have prompted scrutiny from lawmakers and security experts who fear it could be used by the Chinese government for surveillance and disinformation campaigns.
As the Chinese AI application DeepSeek attracts a large number of American users, officials from the Trump administration, lawmakers, and cybersecurity experts are expressing concern that the technology could pose a threat to U.S. national security . DeepSeek's introduction in the U.S. on Monday quickly made it the most downloaded free application in the country on Apple's app store.
The rollout also had a significant impact on Wall Street as investors struggled to understand the sudden appearance of a low-cost, open-source generative AI tool capable of competing with leading artificial intelligence apps such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. Shares of Nvidia, the U.S. manufacturer of advanced chips engineered for AI development, plummeted 17%, wiping roughly $600 billion off its market value — a record single-day drop for a U.S. stock. This explosive debut was labeled a 'wake-up call' by President Trump on Monday. Addressing reporters on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the National Security Council would examine the potential national security implications surrounding DeepSeek's launch, noting that the administration would seek to 'ensure American AI dominance.'What is DeepSeek, and why is it causing Nvidia and other stocks to slump? Some lawmakers are also voicing concerns about the application's accessibility to U.S. users. 'The U.S. cannot allow Chinese Communist Party models such as DeepSeek to risk our national security and leverage our technology to advance their AI ambitions,' Rep. John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who chairs the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said Tuesday in a statement shared on social media. 'We must work to swiftly place stronger export controls on technologies critical to DeepSeek's AI infrastructure.' The spotlight on DeepSeek comes amidst rising tensions over trade, geopolitics, and other issues between the two superpowers. The U.S. has already imposed significant export controls on China in an effort to curb Beijing's production of semiconductors used in developing advanced AI, with the most recent curbs coming in December. Security threat for users While the calls from Moolenaar could be the first indication of a possible congressional crackdown, Ross Burley — a co-founder of the nonprofit Centre for Information Resilience — warned that DeepSeek's emergence in the U.S. raises data security and privacy concerns for users. Chinese law grants Beijing broad authority to access data from companies based in China. '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 and being sent basically to mainland China to be able to inform them of their activities,' Burley told CBS News. '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 added.DeepSeek, which is based in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, states in its privacy policy that the personal information it collects from users is stored 'on secure servers located in the People's Republic of China.' Under this policy, the company says it collects information including users' 'device model, operating system, keystroke patterns or rhythms, IP address, and system language.' DeepSeek also collects 'service-related, diagnostic, and performance information, including crash reports and performance logs,' according to the company. A key difference from TikTok The fact that DeepSeek's servers are based in mainland China differentiates it from TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform that Congress had sought to ban on national security grounds before President Trump signed an executive order last week directing the Justice Department to not enforce the law for a period of 75 days. In an effort to mitigate U.S. regulatory concerns, TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, in 2022 moved all of its U.S. data to infrastructure owned by American software maker Oracle. The legislation banning TikTok — the 'Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,' which President Biden signed into law last April — grants the federal government broad scope to crack down on tech platforms owned by countries regarded as U.S. adversaries. Under this law, Congress can compel a platform to divest its U.S. operations from foreign ownership, and it can be shut down if it qualifies as a threat. The law can apply to any platform that allows users to share content; has more than 1 million monthly active users; is owned by a company located in a foreign adversary-controlled country; and has been determined by the president to present a significant national security threat. But DeepSeek may be seen as less of a threat given that, unlike TikTok, it is an open-source large language model, according to Matt Sheehan, a China fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
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