The emergence of a newly popular artificial intelligence (AI) model from Chinese startup DeepSeek is raising national security and data privacy concerns for the U.S., not unlike those that spurred a ban on TikTok last month.

While the Chinese AI model’s rise has investors worried about the necessity of American AI companies' massive infrastructure spending, it has experts concerned for other reasons — namely the potential ability for the Chinese government to access and manipulate the platform's data.

“The privacy policy explicitly says that it collects information and secures it on servers in China. Any data that you're putting into DeepSeek, that is through the app or through a DeepSeek model available on the internet, that is collected and goes to China,” said Oliver Roberts, co-head of the AI Practice Group at law firm Holtzman Vogel.

DeepSeek exploded onto the scene last month with its R1 model, quickly rising to the top of Apple’s App Store and overtaking OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The model’s rapidly growing popularity, along with the Chinese AI startup’s impressive claims about its development, sent investors into a panic about American-made AI, sparking a mass sell-off in the tech sector.

DeepSeek claims to have built the R1 model using just a few thousand reduced-capacity chips from Nvidia, for a measly overall cost of $5.6 million. This contradicted the assumption of American firms that massive investment in AI infrastructure is necessary to advance the technology.

Microsoft plans to invest $80 billion in data centers throughout 2025, while Meta will nearly double its spending on capital expenditures this year to between $60 billion and $65 billion.

OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank have also taken the lead on the Trump administration’s new Stargate project that plans to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the next four years.

Even as worries abound about what DeepSeek........

© The Hill