A bipartisan House committee said today that the Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek Ltd. represents a “profound threat” to America’s national security, accusing it of serving as an “open-source intelligence asset” that funnels data on U.S. users back to China.
The House Select Committee on China also accused DeepSeek of coaching its models on data “unlawfully obtained” from U.S. AI firms. In response to its findings, it recommends that the White House place latest restrictions on the export of AI models to China.
DeepSeek is a China-based AI lab that rose to prominence earlier this 12 months when it launched DeepSeek-R1, an open-source large language model that’s optimized for reasoning. It outperforms among the most advanced models from firms reminiscent of OpenAI and Anthropic PBC on a spread of complex tasks, despite being trained at a much lower cost.
Shortly after DeepSeek R1 was launched, OpenAI and its most distinguished backer, Microsoft Corp., cried foul, saying that the model was trained using data stolen from their AI models. They accused the corporate of using distillation techniques, which involve studying the outputs of other models and copying them to speed up development.
In its report, the committee cites testimony from OpenAI, which believes DeepSeek “circumvented” the guardrails by itself models to extract their reasoning outputs and speed up the event of R1. OpenAI also said that DeepSeek more than likely used open-source AI models to create synthetic data with the intention to train the R1 model. It further accused the corporate of using its models to grade R1’s responses, filter and transform its training data.
OpenAI’s accusations are somewhat ironic, considering that it has been widely criticized for scraping the web to collect up content with the intention to train its models, without asking anyone for permission.
Along with stealing data from OpenAI, the committee also accused DeepSeek of “funneling American user data” to China through unsecured networks, adding that this information may very well be a useful intelligence asset for Chinese Communist Party’s leadership.
That said, it’s essential to notice the excellence between the R1 model and DeepSeek’s consumer-focused chat application, which has similarities to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The chatbot service is hosted on servers based in China, and these are indeed more than likely gathering data on users. Nonetheless, R1 itself is an open-source model that may be hosted on any server anywhere on the planet. U.S. cloud computing firms, including Microsoft and Meta Platforms Inc., are already hosting the R1 model on their very own servers.
The committee warned that DeepSeek R1 also censors its responses to suppress information regarding democracy, Taiwan and Hong Kong, with none disclosure to users. The report further notes that DeepSeek founder Lian Wenfang has close links to China’s CCP, and is “ideologically aligned with Xi Jinping Thought.”
The White House has not yet commented on the committee’s report, however it does look like taking motion against DeepSeek and other Chinese AI firms. Last month, it was reported to be considering banning government employees from using the R1 model. Earlier this week, Nvidia revealed that the federal government had placed latest restrictions on its ability to ship its powerful graphics processing units, that are widely utilized in AI model training, to China.
Nvidia has been told it must secure a special export license to ship its H20 GPUs to China in future, but the problem of obtaining said license means the foundations essentially amount to a ban on any more exports of the chips. The H20 chip was developed especially for Chinese firms in response to earlier restrictions placed on China, but despite its performance being throttled, it’s believed that the chip was utilized by DeepSeek to coach R1 and its other models.
It stays to be seen if tighter restrictions will hinder DeepSeek’s progress. Critics say the sooner restrictions forced the corporate to make more efficient models on lower-end processors, they usually warn it should only intensify China’s efforts to develop its own chips.
Image: Unsplash
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