DeepSeek reportedly aids China's military and helps evade export controls

AI firm DeepSeek is aiding China's military and intelligence operations, according to a senior U.S. official. The official further added that the Chinese tech startup sought to use Southeast Asian shell companies to access high-end semiconductors that cannot be shipped to China under U.S. rules. The U.S. conclusions reflect a growing conviction in Washington that the capabilities behind the rapid rise of one of China's flagship AI enterprises may have been exaggerated and relied heavily on U.S. technology.

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the technology world in January, saying its artificial intelligence reasoning models were on par with or better than U.S. industry-leading models at a fraction of the cost.

"We understand that DeepSeek has willingly provided and will likely continue to provide support to China's military and intelligence operations," a senior State Department official said in an interview. "This effort goes above and beyond open-source access to DeepSeek's AI models," the official said.

The official, among his allegations, said DeepSeek is sharing user information and statistics with Beijing's surveillance apparatus.

The big three U.S. cloud providers Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet's Google offer DeepSeek to customers.

Chinese law requires companies operating in China to provide data to the government when requested. But the suggestion that DeepSeek is already doing so is likely to raise privacy and other concerns for the firm's tens of millions of daily global users. The U.S. also maintains restrictions on companies it believes are linked to China's military-industrial complex.