DeepSeek shook the AI market when it emerged earlier this year, claiming to offer similar performance to OpenAI’s market-leading ChatGPT for a fraction of the development cost, but the company’s ties to China – including storing data on servers in the country – have raised privacy and security concerns around the world.
“Any time you have AI models with data servers built in China, by nature there are privacy concerns due to the fact of where the data is housed and what biases are built into the AI models.
Bill Conner, chief executive of AI software firm Jitterbit, and a former security adviser to the US and UK governments, said the public and businesses around the world should seriously consider whether to use the app before downloading it, or accessing the chatbot through the website.
Downloading Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek is a “personal choice” for the public, the Government has said, adding that it keeps new technologies under constant review.
South Korea has become the latest country to limit access to the new chatbot, pausing new downloads of DeepSeek from app stores in the country over privacy concerns.
