The US State Department has raised concerns about Chinese companies, including DeeSeek, allegedly using the research of America without permission. The US asked its diplomats to discuss issues about how foreign players might be extracting and reusing their AI technology, as per diplomatic cable sent on Friday, seen by Reuters. This move comes after DeepSeek introduced a preview of its new V4 model which is designed with chips from Huawei. Notably, the preview shows how China wants to build its own AI ecosystem with minimal reliance on the Western countries.
US Raise Concerns Over AI Misuse
As per Reuters, the US told its diplomats to discuss the concerns about how foreign players might be extracting US AI technology. The major worries surround how a cheaper alternative could be developed by Chinese firms relying on work originally developed by the American Labs.
The cable notes ‘distillation’ as a key significant issue. This process enables developers to train smaller and affordable AI models using responses obtained by advanced systems. While it can reduce costs, the US fears it may also be used to copy their original technology without direct access. Previously, OpenAI told US lawmakers that DeepSeek could be trying to replicate capabilities similar to their own systems which also include ChatGPT.
China Denies Claims
China has denied these allegations. The Chinese Embassy in Washington reportedly stated that the claims are unfounded and called them as attempts to slow down the progress of China in AI. DeepSeek has not responded to any of these allegations. However, it previously said that its models are trained on the data available publicly through web crawling and not on outputs generated by its competition.
As per the privacy policy of DeepSeek, the app collects data such as your email address, date of birth, name, IP address, device information, phone number, files, chat history and uploaded prompts. Moreover, when a users logs in with any third-party accounts, like Apple or Google, DeepSeek gets that information on the user’s activity on other websites through its advertising partners. It is noteworthy that the privacy policies of the company clearly mentions that DeepSeek can share this data with its service providers, law enforcement agencies, analytical partners and advertisers.
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Should You Be Worried?
“We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China,” reads DeepSeek’s privacy policy document. This has become the major point of contention for foreign governments including India. Last year, the Finance Ministry of India had warned its staff on the use of AI tools such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Similarly, the FM Nirmala Sitharaman held a meeting on Thursday with banking officials and the Union Minister For Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw to assess the impact of emerging AI models and how such technologies can be misused to exploit software vulnerabilities.
