The United States Navy has officially banned its members from using DeepSeek — an artificial intelligence chatbot created in China — out of fear the Chinese government could exploit sensitive data, according to a report.
In an email to members of the military branch, the Navy banned the use of DeepSeek AI “in any capacity” for fear of “potential security and ethical concerns associated with the model’s origin and usage,” CNBC reported.
DeepSeek immediately shot to the top of the charts of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store — being downloaded over 2 million times since it debuted on Jan. 15, with most downloads coming in the last three days.
Experts have raised concerns over the app storing user data — as detailed as keystrokes — in China where it can be accessed by hands unfriendly to American citizens.
“What sets this context apart is that DeepSeek is a Chinese company based in China,” Angela Zhang, a law professor at the University of Southern California, told The Post, comparing DeepSeek to the other Chinese tech problem-child, TikTok.
“This raises the question of whether the collection of data such as IP addresses and keystroke patterns could pose a national security threat,” Zhang said.
All China-based companies are forced by the Chinese Communist Party’s cybersecurity laws to share any data with the government upon request.
The American markets were rocked by the country’s announcement that they had developed an advanced AI program at a fraction of the cost it took Western rival OpenAI to produce ChatGPT.
Lian Wenfeng, the millennial math whiz founder of DeepSeek, supposedly designed the AI program over the course of just a few months — and spent just $6 million to bring it to fruition.
The app hit the market just days after President Trump announced a $500 billion AI initiative called “Stargate.”
Major US tech stocks lost $1 trillion in market value on Monday — a whopping 17% loss across the board on the Dow Jones — as hysteria reached a fever pitch over the implications of the supposedly game-changing AI advancement.
Billionaire tech-entrepreneur Marc Andreessen likened DeepSeek to the artificial intelligence equivalent to Sputnik — the Russian space vessel that beat the US, in 1957, to become the first man-made vessel to orbit the Earth.
But Trump seemed less threatened by the new development from the East, tamping down concerns at a press conference Monday.
“I’ve been reading about China and some of the companies in China, one in particular, coming up with a faster method of AI and much less expensive method,” Trump said in an address to House Republicans in Florida.
“And that’s good because you don’t have to spend as much money. I view that as a positive, as an asset. So I really think — if it’s fact, and if it’s true, and nobody really knows what it is — but I view that as a positive, because you’ll be doing that too,” Trump said.
“So you won’t be spending as much, and you’ll get the same result hopefully,” Trump said, adding that he believed the new company will be a “wake-up call” for American AI enterprises.
