(Credit: Emily Forlini)
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."