The Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek has been blocked in the federal parliament since last week.
The Chinese AI model DeepSeek has been inaccessible in the federal parliament and other government services since last week. This was confirmed by the Chamber services to Belga. “This decision will be re-evaluated as soon as there is more clarity about the dangers associated with the platform”, states an internal memo.
Does DeepSeek safeguard privacy and security?
More and more questions are arising about the security and privacy measures that DeepSeek employs. An investigation by AppSoc showed that the chatbot gets a risk score of 8.3 out of ten. Additionally, security company Wiz discovered that a database with chat conversations was openly available on the internet.
These results did not go unnoticed. Italy has already blocked access to DeepSeek, and South Korea removed the app from local app stores. Many European countries are concerned and are now further investigating whether DeepSeek complies with European data protection regulations.
Several DPAs (data protection authorities) have already taken actions against DeepSeek and more actions may follow in the future
, said a spokesperson for the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) in an email after a meeting with European supervisors.
Scale-AI shook the AI world with the launch of DeepSeek. The model is designed at a fraction of the cost of popular models from larger companies. However, it did draw inspiration from data from OpenAI. The future will show whether the European Union will simply allow DeepSeek or block it entirely.