Increasingly vocal members of the national security community have a message for those celebrating DeepSeek, the Chinese company that claims to have built an AI model on par with those of American tech giants, at a fraction of the cost: slow your roll. And if you work in government or security, don’t use the app.
Based in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, DeepSeek says in its privacy policy that the personal information it collects about its users — which includes things like “keystroke patterns or rhythms” and IP addresses — is stored “on secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.” Security researchers have also noted that DeepSeek sends personal user data like phone numbers and app activity back to China, where the government has broad authority to review the data of companies based there — something that’s been a significant issue for another prominent Chinese phenom.
“It already appears to be the new TikTok from a security perspective,” Chris Herndon, who ran cybersecurity for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, told Forbes.
Owned by Chinese parent ByteDance, the social media app has been the subject of much scrutiny over its ties to China, surveillance of users and potential to be used as a Chinese propaganda machine (and it now needs to find an American buyer to survive a ban).
Similar data practices are already raising major red flags around Deepseek. While there’s no evidence that Deepseek is currently sharing its data with the Chinese government or intelligence agencies, there’s good reason to be worried, said Rob Lee, research chief at cybersecurity and forensics training organization SANS Institute. “Compared to competing AI models, DeepSeek offers users significantly less control over their data,” Lee said. “Users lack the ability to ensure their personal work is deleted, restrict their data from being used in model training, or even understand what happens when they delete their accounts.”
There’s also the danger of leaks. On Wednesday, cybersecurity company Wiz reported a database containing DeepSeek chat histories, user logs and keys to potentially access accounts had been left open online.
DeepSeek has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Its content is troubling too. For one, the model won’t answer questions on topics commonly censored by the Chinese government, including about Tiananmen Square. And as Forbes reported on Tuesday, cybersecurity researchers found they were able to turn DeepSeek “evil,” convincing the model to produce malware for stealing credit card data.
The bans are already beginning. On Friday, the U.S. Navy prohibited staff from using DeepSeek, CNBC reported, and the White House is looking into its implications for national security. Hank Thomas, a former Army intelligence officer and ex-Booz Allen Hamilton exec turned VC, the Pentagon will likely block staff use of the app as well. He’s worried about people with security clearances naively downloading the app, “thinking they are being safe with their searches but not understanding the ramifications of doing so lies in what it can do in the background.”
Bans might make sense for military personnel. But banning it outright? That’s a bridge too far for Senator Ron Wyden. “The current strategy of banning popular Chinese tech applications in the name of safety and American leadership is clearly not working,” the senator told Forbes.
The cat’s already out of the bag. Enforcing any kind of ban would be impossible because DeepSeek’s model is open source. In the last few days, users on the model repository site Hugging Face have already created hundreds of new versions.
“Even if the app is booted from the app stores under the TikTok law, the model can be easily shared, downloaded and run at low cost by users and researchers,” Wyden said. “There’s no putting this genie back in the bottle.”
He urged the Trump administration to encourage more open sourcing of AI models among U.S. companies to allow researchers and the public to inspect them. While Meta’s Llama is open source, models from OpenAI and Anthropic are not. “Through DeepSeek, China has effectively used open source concepts to its advantage. America should take that idea and go further,” Wyden added.
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