A bipartisan congressional bill is being introduced to ban China's DeepSeek artificial intelligence software from government devices.
U.S. Reps. Darin LaHood, R-Ill., and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., are introducing the legislation on national security grounds, saying the company's technology presents an espionage risk.
“The technology race with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not one the United States can afford to lose,” LaHood said in a statement. “The national security threat that DeepSeek — a CCP-affiliated company — poses to the United States is alarming.”
He said DeepSeek’s generative AI program can acquire the data of U.S. users and store the information for unidentified use by Chinese authorities.
The chatbot app, however, has intentionally hidden code that could send user login information to China Mobile, a state-owned telecommunications company that has been banned from operating in the U.S., according to an analysis by Ivan Tsarynny, CEO of Feroot Security, which specializes in data protection and cybersecurity. His analysis was published earlier by The Associated Press.
“Under no circumstances can we allow a CCP company to obtain sensitive government or personal data,” Gottheimer said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Thursday that it opposed the “broadening of the concept of national security and the politicization of economic and technological issues.”
“The Chinese government attaches great importance to and legally protects data privacy and security,” ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a regular briefing in Beijing. “It has never and will never require companies or individuals to collect or store data in violation of the law.”
A representative for DeepSeek could not be reached for comment. The bill was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which said DeepSeek did not respond to a request for comment.
Other governments have already issued warnings about or placed restrictions on the use of DeepSeek, including South Korea and Italy. Australia and Taiwan both banned DeepSeek from all government devices this week over security concerns.
Founded in 2023, DeepSeek entered the mainstream U.S. consciousness late last month amid reports it was able to produce better AI results at a fraction of the cost of what American tech firms have so far been able to achieve. Those fears caused U.S. tech stocks to briefly tumble last week.
There remains debate about the veracity of those reports, with some technologists saying there has not been a full accounting of DeepSeek's development costs.
“It’s mindboggling that we are unknowingly allowing China to survey Americans and we’re doing nothing about it,” Tsarynny told the AP. “It’s hard to believe that something like this was accidental. There are so many unusual things to this. You know that saying ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’? In this instance, there’s a lot of smoke,” he said.
