OpenAI Calls for Ban on DeepSeek, Citing National Security Concerns

OpenAI calls DeepSeek 'state-controlled,' calls for bans on 'PRC-produced' models | TechCrunch

In a new policy proposal, OpenAI describes Chinese AI lab DeepSeek as "state-subsidized" and "state-controlled," and recommends that the U.S. government consider banning models from the outfit and similar People's Republic of China (PRC)-supported operations. The proposal, a submission for the Trump Administration's "AI Action Plan" initiative, claims that DeepSeek's models, including its R1 "reasoning" model, are insecure because DeepSeek faces requirements under Chinese law to comply with demands for user data. Banning the use of "PRC-produced" models in all countries considered "Tier 1" under the Biden Administration's export rules would prevent privacy and "security risks," OpenAI says, including the "risk of IP theft." It's unclear whether OpenAI's references to "models" are meant to refer to DeepSeek's API, the lab's open models, or both. DeepSeek's open models don't contain mechanisms that would allow the Chinese government to siphon user data; companies including Microsoft, Perplexity, and Amazon host them on their infrastructure. OpenAI has previously accused DeepSeek, which rose to prominence earlier this year, of "distilling" knowledge from OpenAI's models against its terms of service. But OpenAI's new allegations -- that DeepSeek is supported by the PRC and under its command -- are an escalation of the company's campaign against the Chinese lab. There isn't a clear link between the Chinese government and DeepSeek, a spin-off from a quantitative hedge fund called High-Flyer. However, the PRC has taken an increased interest in DeepSeek in recent months. Several weeks ago, DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

With Flood of Chinese AI on the Horizon, US Mulls DeepSeek Ban

The Trump administration is reportedly considering a DeepSeek ban on government devices, but it might also ban it outright, à la TikTok, The Wall Street Journal reports. Concern in Washington over Chinese AI apps has extended to DeepSeek, with the Trump administration reportedly looking to ban it on government devices. National security is the major issue, The Wall Street Journal reports, particularly as it relates to DeepSeek's handling of user data, which is stored on Chinese servers. Companies based in the region can be compelled to hand over information to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), something the US government cited in its push to ban TikTok. The TikTok ban is currently on hold after President Trump gave the app more time to find a US buyer. The WSJ reports that the administration is also considering an outright ban on DeepSeek in the US, though its sources say discussions are "still at an early stage." Another option is preventing US companies from building products with DeepSeek via cloud service providers like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, both of which have added it to their roster of available models. This could mean higher AI costs for these businesses if they had to replace it with models from OpenAI or other more expensive, US-made options. At a minimum, the US would bar government employees from downloading the DeepSeek app on government devices. Other nations have already limited access to or banned DeepSeek including Italy, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Taiwan. In the US, New York and Texas banned it on government devices. In our testing, we found DeepSeek to censor its answers and regurgitate CCP propaganda. At one point, its answer used "we" pronouns, speaking as the CCP. But it's unclear if banning individual products, like TikTok or DeepSeek, will be an effective long-term strategy. A Flood of Chinese AI Coming: Are They Any Good? This week, two Chinese companies debuted AI models that supposedly rival DeepSeek, though the claims are difficult to verify. Retail giant Alibaba says its model outperforms DeepSeek and OpenAI. "In a series of authoritative benchmark tests, Qianwen QwQ-32B model performed exceptionally well, almost completely surpassing OpenAI-o1-mini and being on par with the strongest open source reasoning model DeepSeek-R1," Alibaba says, as translated by Google. A startup called Manus AI, meanwhile, claims to have built "a truly autonomous agent...the next paradigm of human-machine collaboration, and potentially a glimpse into AGI." In the video below, CEO and co-founder Yichao Peak Ji gives the example of the AI reading resumes and taking notes on candidates on its own, even if the human closes their laptop. However, some doubt Manus' claims, accusing it of overstating capabilities for its moment in the spotlight, the South China Morning Post reports. Manus is only available as an extremely limited, invitation-only preview. Adding some intrigue to its short rise to fame, social media company X suspended its account over alleged ties to cryptocurrency scandals. "We are actively working with the X team to resolve this issue. Initial observations suggest that the suspension may be related to third-party mentions of cryptocurrency scams," Ji tweeted on his own account. "To clarify: Manus has never been involved in any cryptocurrency projects, token issuance, or blockchain initiatives."

OpenAI calls on US government to ban DeepSeek, calling it 'state-subsidized' and 'state-controlled'

OpenAI would like to see the removal of "overly burdensome state laws" OpenAI has sent a proposal to the Office of Science and Technology Policy that calls on the US government to ban the use of DeepSeek in governments, military, and intelligence services. Mentioning the Chinese AI by name, the proposal calls DeepSeek "state-subsidized" and "state-controlled". The letter, available on its website and signed by Chris Lehane, the Vice President of, Global Affairs at OpenAI, also proposes "banning the use of PRC-produced equipment (e.g., Huawei Ascend chips) and models that violate user privacy and create security risks such as the risk of IP theft" among what it called Tier 1 countries. The letter says "As America's world-leading AI sector approaches artificial general intelligence (AGI), with a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) determined to overtake us by 2030, the Trump Administration's new AI Action Plan can ensure that American-led AI built on democratic principles continues to prevail over CCP-built autocratic, authoritarian AI." DeepSeek recently caused a shockwave in the AI industry by providing similar results to the ChatGPT o1 reasoning model with its DeepSeek-R1 model, but at a much lower price for developers and free for web browser use. Stock prices for companies heavily invested in AI saw an immediate drop, although the market has since returned to previous levels. Many have questioned whether DeekSeek's rapid progress was truly down to an innovative new training methodology or whether it had "distilled" some training data from OpenAI against its terms and conditions. In fact, as we noticed on TechRadar, DeepSeek would sometimes mistake itself for ChatGPT when asked who it was. The letter from OpenAI states: "As with Huawei, there is significant risk in building on top of DeepSeek models in critical infrastructure and other high-risk use cases given the potential that DeepSeek could be compelled by the CCP to manipulate its models to cause harm." There is no direct evidence to suggest that DeepSeek, which is owned and controlled by the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, is controlled by the Chinese government, however it's been noted that you cannot get the DeepSeek-R1 chatbot to answer questions about political topics sensitive to the PRC like the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. OpenAI clearly sees humanity as being on the doorstep to artificial general intelligence (AGI), which describes systems that possess human-like general intelligence. AGI is something that OpenAI has been working towards since its creation as a company, and the proposal also attacks the "overly burdensome state laws" that are holding it back. "As our CEO Sam Altman has written, we are at the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity: the Intelligence Age. But we must ensure that people have freedom of intelligence, by which we mean the freedom to access and benefit from AGI, protected from both autocratic powers that would take people's freedoms away, and layers of laws and bureaucracy that would prevent our realizing them."

Report: US could ban DeepSeek's app on government devices - SiliconANGLE

The White House is reportedly weighing a new rule that would prohibit the installation of DeepSeek's app on government devices. The Wall Street Journal today cited sources as saying that the regulation is "likely" to be implemented. According to the report, the move is motivated by concerns about how DeepSeek processes users' data. The Chinese artificial intelligence lab doesn't disclose details such as who has access to the information it collects. DeepSeek rose to prominence earlier this year with the release of DeepSeek-R1, an open-source large language model optimized for reasoning. It can outperform OpenAI's competing o1 reasoning algorithm across a range of tasks. Moreover, DeepSeek claims that R1 cost less to train than many earlier LLMs. Alongside R1, DeepSeek provides a ChatGPT-like chatbot app for consumers. That service is the focus of the ban reportedly being considered by the Trump administration. At one point, DeepSeek was the most downloaded app on both the App Store and Google Play. DeepSeek's mobile client is based not on R1 but rather DeepSeek-V3, an LLM the AI lab open-sourced in December. The latter algorithm has more limited reasoning capabilities. At the architecture level, however, the two models have many similarities because R1 is based on V3. Both models include 671 billion parameters. Those parameters are organized into subnets, neural networks that each focus on a different set of tasks. When a user enters a prompt, the answer is generated by only one of the neural networks to reduce hardware use. DeepSeek trained V3 on 14.8 billion tokens' worth of data. One token corresponds to a few letters or numbers. LLMs usually generate output one token at a time, but the AI lab took a different approach with V3: during training, the model was configured to generate multiple tokens at once. DeepSeek says that this configuration helped boost V3's performance. R1, the company's best reasoning model, is a version of V3 that has been trained more extensively. The extra training consisted partly of supervised fine-tuning, which involves supplying an LLM with examples of how it should perform tasks. DeepSeek used reinforcement learning to further hone R1's capabilities. According to the Journal, the DeepSeek ban the White House is weighing could extend beyond government devices. Officials are also considering prohibiting app store operators from distributing the chatbot service. Another step under consideration is "putting limits" on how U.S. cloud providers can offer DeepSeek models to customers. Discussion about the latter two moves are said to be in an early stage. It's unclear if the curbs on cloud providers would only cover R1 and V3 or also extend to DeepSeek's other, less capable LLMs. In January, the company released a reasoning model called R1-Zero that was trained entirely using reinforcement learning. Typically, LLM developers also use supervised fine-tuning. DeepSeek says R1-Zero is the first open-source model to "validate that reasoning capabilities of LLMs can be incentivized purely through RL." The company has also open-sourced a number of so-called distilled models based on R1. Their training datasets incorporate some of R1's knowledge. The distilled models, which are based on the Llama and Qwen open-source LLM families, range in size from 1.5 billion to 70 billion parameters.

US Said to be Mulling DeepSeek Ban from Government Devices

The White House has not officially commented on DeepSeek's ban The Trump administration is weighing a ban on Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek from US government devices over national-security concerns, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday. US officials are worried about DeepSeek's handling of user data, which the company says it stores in servers located in China, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Administration officials are also considering banning the chatbot from app stores and putting limits on how US-based cloud service providers could offer DeepSeek's AI models to their customers, the Journal said, adding that those discussions are still at an early stage. DeepSeek's low-cost AI models triggered a major sell-off in global equity markets in January, as investors worried that its arrival could threaten current AI market leaders. A group of 21 state attorneys general urged Congress on Thursday to pass a bill to bar government devices from downloading and using DeepSeek artificial intelligence software on government devices. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. © Thomson Reuters 2025

US likely to ban Chinese app DeepSeek from government devices: Report

US officials are worried about DeepSeek's handling of user data, which the company says it stores in servers located in China, the report said.The Trump administration is likely to ban Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek from US government devices over national-security concerns, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing unnamed sources. US officials are worried about DeepSeek's handling of user data, which the company says it stores in servers located in China, the report said. Administration officials were also considering banning the chatbot from app stores and putting limits on how US-based cloud service providers could offer DeepSeek's AI models to their customers, the Journal said, adding that those discussions were still at an early stage. DeepSeek's low-cost AI models triggered a major sell-off in global equity markets in January, as investors worried that its arrival could threaten current AI market leaders.

Trump administration mulls banning Chinese AI app DeepSeek

Image credit: Getty Images The Trump administration is weighing a ban on Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek from US government devices over national-security concerns, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday. US officials are worried about DeepSeek's handling of user data, which the company says it stores in servers located in China, according to theWall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Administration officials are also considering banning the chatbot from app stores and putting limits on how US-based cloud service providers could offer DeepSeek's AI models to their customers, the Journal said, adding that those discussions are still at an early stage. DeepSeek's low-cost AI models triggered a major sell-off in global equity markets in January, as investors worried that its arrival could threaten current AI market leaders. A group of 21 state attorneys general urged Congress on Thursday to pass a bill to bar government devices from downloading and using DeepSeek artificial intelligence software on government devices. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump administration reportedly eyeing DeepSeek ban on US government...

The Trump administration is reportedly "likely" to ban Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek from US government devices due to national security concerns. As The Post reported, cybersecurity experts have warned that DeepSeek could pose an even greater threat to national security and the data privacy of American users than TikTok. DeepSeek's own terms of service reveal that it collects vast troves of user data ranging from IP addresses to keystrokes and then stores the information on servers in China -- where they are subject to government laws requiring the startup to share data with investigators upon request. US officials are specifically worried about that dynamic, sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal. They also believe that DeepSeek hasn't fully explained how it uses the data it collects and who is able to access the sensitive information. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Aside from weighing a ban for DeepSeek downloads on government devices, officials are mulling potentially barring the AI chatbot from US-based app stores run by the likes of Apple and Google or restricting US cloud computing firms from supporting access to the service for their customers, the Journal reported. The sources reportedly said discussions on those two alternative paths are still in their early stages. DeepSeek upended the US tech sector earlier this year after releasing an AI model that it claimed to have trained for less than $6 million -- raising fears that American firms like Google and OpenAI have overspent on the technology. At one point, DeepSeek was the most-downloaded app in Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store. However, some experts, including Trump administration AI czar David Sacks and Elon Musk, have said DeepSeek's claims are misleading and not a full accounting of its spending. Last month, the state of New York banned DeepSeek from government devices due to what it described as "serious" concerns about "foreign government surveillance and censorship, including how DeepSeek can be used to harvest user data and steal technology secrets." The US Navy and NASA have also barred access to the app for their workers. A bipartisan bill seeking to ban DeepSeek from government devices also was introduced in Congress last month, but has yet to advance. Congress banned TikTok over national security concerns after its Chinese parent, ByteDance, failed to divest by a Jan. 19 deadline. However, President Trump issued an executive order delaying enforcement of the law by 75 days until a US buyer could be found. On Thursday, Trump said he would "probably" extend the order if necessary.

OpenAI calls for DeepSeek ban in the US - Softonic

OpenAI urges the US government to ban DeepSeek in critical sectors, citing national security risks and concerns over Chinese influence in artificial intelligence. OpenAI has urged the US government to ban DeepSeek from critical sectors, citing concerns over security risks and foreign influence. The company warns that DeepSeek, a Chinese-developed AI model, is state-subsidized and potentially state-controlled, posing threats to national security and intellectual property. In a letter sent to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, OpenAI explicitly calls for banning DeepSeek in government, military, and intelligence services. The company argues that Chinese-produced AI models could be compelled to manipulate information, potentially jeopardizing security and democratic values. OpenAI also advocates for removing Chinese-produced hardware, such as Huawei Ascend chips, from Tier 1 countries. The company points to China's goal of surpassing the US in AI development by 2030, a milestone OpenAI believes could shift global technological power. DeepSeek has recently gained attention for its remarkable AI performance at a fraction of OpenAI's cost, creating concerns about unfair competition and potential intellectual property violations. Some analysts speculate that DeepSeek may have illegally used OpenAI models, citing instances where the chatbot mistakenly identified itself as ChatGPT. Despite OpenAI's claims, there is no direct evidence that DeepSeek is controlled by the Chinese government. However, restrictions on political discussions within the model suggest possible compliance with the Chinese Communist Party's censorship policies.