DeepSeek’s Popular AI App Is Explicitly Sending US Data to China

The United States’ recent regulatory action against the Chinese-owned social video platform TikTok prompted mass migration to another Chinese app, the social platform “Rednote.” Now, a generative artificial intelligence platform from the Chinese developer DeepSeek is exploding in popularity, posing a potential threat to US AI dominance and offering the latest evidence that moratoriums like the TikTok ban will not stop Americans from using Chinese-owned digital services. On Monday, DeepSeek’s creators limited new sign-ups after claiming the app had been overrun with a “large-scale malicious attack.” While DeepSeek has several AI models, some of which can be downloaded and run locally on your laptop, the majority of people will likely access the service through its iOS or Android apps or its web chat interface. In many ways, it’s likely sending more data back to China than TikTok has in recent years, since the social media company moved to US cloud hosting to try to deflect US security concerns “It shouldn’t take a panic over Chinese AI to remind people that most companies in the business set the terms for how they use your private data” says John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. The English-language DeepSeek privacy policy, which lays out how the company handles user data, is unequivocal: “We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People's Republic of China.” In other words, all the conversations and questions you send to DeepSeek, along with the answers that it generates, are being sent to China or can be.