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Trump declares China's DeepSeek AI 'wake-up call'

President Trump said DeepSeek, the Chinese startup behind a popular new artificial intelligence (AI) model, represented a “wake-up call” for American tech firms.

© Mark Schiefelbein, Associated Press

“The release of DeepSeek, AI from a Chinese company, should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win,” Trump told House Republicans at their annual policy retreat.

The president also suggested that the rise of the new AI model, which contributed to significant stock losses for the tech sector Monday, could be seen as a positive.

“That could be very much a positive development,” he added during the address at his National Doral resort outside Miami. “So instead of spending billions and billions, you’ll spend less and you’ll come up with, hopefully, the same solution.”

DeepSeek exploded onto the AI scene last week after releasing its R1 open-source reasoning model, which it claims performs on par with OpenAI’s models.

It surged to the top of Apple’s App Store over the weekend, overtaking OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Most notable about the AI model, however, is how it was built. DeepSeek claims to have spent just $5.6 million and relied on a couple thousand reduced-capability chips to train its latest models.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated the president's comments Tuesday, while placing blame on the Biden administration for the rise of DeepSeek.

"The last administration sat on their hands and allowed China to rapidly develop this AI program," Leavitt said at the first formal briefing of the new Trump term. "President Trump believes in restoring American AI dominance."

Trump has sought to roll back "some of the onerous regulations on the AI industry" in his first days in office and appointed venture capitalist David Sacks to serve as the first White House AI and cryto czar, she noted.

The National Security Council is looking into potential national security concerns related to the AI model, Leavitt added.

Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.

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