The US government is taking measures against DeepSeek. Government personnel will no longer be allowed to use the model, but further measures are on the table.
Trump and his administration are considering measures against DeepSeek, writes the Wall Street Journal. The AI model of Chinese origin is viewed with suspicion due to the processing of user data in China. As a first step, the White House will very likely impose a ban on the app for government personnel.
This may not be the end of it, according to the Wall Street Journal. Further measures being considered include restricting DeepSeek from Google and Apple app stores in the United States, as was done earlier with TikTok. A third step under consideration is to prevent cloud providers from offering the DeepSeek model from their cloud.
That the United States would eventually take measures against DeepSeek comes as no surprise. Not because Trump is against everything from China, but because other countries have already done so. Since last week, DeepSeek is no longer accessible to federal government personnel in Belgium. Italy, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and even Taiwan have also imposed restrictions on the use of DeepSeek.
Shockwave
The arrival of DeepSeek in January shook the AI world to its core. Compared to the models of OpenAI, Google, and others, the DeepSeek R1 model was developed with a fraction of resources and achieves comparable results in popular benchmarks. There were even claims that DeepSeek would herald the downfall of Nvidia; a rather premature statement.
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Security researchers quickly discovered that there were some issues with the model’s security. DeepSeek failed multiple security tests and the company behind it, Scale AI, left a database with users’ conversation history wide open. What governments are most concerned about is that DeepSeek’s servers are located in China.
The United States and other governments can impose restrictions on DeepSeek, but banning the model entirely is not so simple. DeepSeek is open-source, meaning the model is freely available. Hyperscalers like Microsoft offer the model on their own infrastructure and can thus guarantee that usage data is stored in compliance with regulations.