The US Commerce Department is investigating whether DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, has been using advanced US chips prohibited for export to China. This follows the launch of DeepSeek’s popular free AI assistant, which quickly became the most downloaded app on Apple’s App Store, raising concerns about China’s growing AI capabilities.
Also Read: Microsoft Integrates DeepSeek’s R1 AI Model into Azure, GitHub
Despite its success, DeepSeek’s chatbot scored poorly in an audit by NewsGuard, with only 17% accuracy in news-related tasks. It repeated false claims 30% of the time and gave vague answers 53% of the time, ranking it below its Western competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The chatbot’s low accuracy has raised doubts about the startup’s claims of offering AI performance similar to Microsoft-backed OpenAI at a much lower cost. Meanwhile, Italy’s data protection authority, Garante, has blocked DeepSeek’s chatbot due to inadequate privacy practices and concerns about data storage in China.
