A US congressional committee has branded the Chinese artificial intelligence technology DeepSeek as an “existential threat” to America’s national security in the escalating trade war between the United States and China.
DeepSeek was also framed as being heavily associated with the Communist Party and “intended to illegally erode US technological superiority and significant American policies to safeguard national security,” the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party report added.
The report, published on Wednesday, claimed that DeepSeek had ties with military research and strategic laboratories like the Zhejiang Lab, which is pivotal in the formation of China’s scientific and technological power, the South China Morning Post reported on Thursday.
DeepSeek’s Rise and the Shadow of Chinese Data Concerns
DeepSeek is a serious threat to the security of our nation. While seeming to be nothing more than just another AI chatbot … when we examine it more closely, we discover the app reports to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is a security risk to its users, and is based on a model that secretly censors and manipulates information in line with Chinese law,” the report said.
It also referenced a Feroot Security study which asserted DeepSeek activities were passing American user data back to China via “back-end infrastructure pertaining to China Mobile,” and integrating “tracking tools” from other Chinese tech companies such as ByteDance and Tencent.
DeepSeek, the latest AI offering, made the world sit up and take notice with its low-cost model. Moreover, DeepSeek was the number one free app on Apple’s Appstore, outcompeting ChatGPT.
US House Committee report came out as America and China placed high tariffs on each other. While America placed 245 percent tariffs on imports from China, Beijing placed 125 percent tariffs on US exports to China The House Committee has also questioned Nvidia, the giant chip maker, about its customers and deals with the start-up.
Notably, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang took an unplanned visit to Beijing on Thursday and met with upper-level Chinese officials a day after Washington said that it will now require a license to export its H20 chips to China.
China Courts Nvidia as DeepSeek Faces Scrutiny and US Targets Tech Firms
State-run CCTV said that Huang visited Beijing on Thursday at the invitation of the state-sponsored China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, which represented Chinese exporters.
Huang, 62, sat with Ren Hongbin, chairman of the council, and hoped that Nvidia would go on cooperating with China since the nation is a “key market” for the company. Some countries, such as India banned the use of officials employing DeepSeek due to alleged data breaches.
China denounced the measures as tantamount to the politicization of trade and technology issues. The US committee designated China Mobile, China’s state-owned telecommunications carrier, as a “military-related” company and ByteDance, the parent of popular social app TikTok, as “foreign adversary-controlled,” and the Pentagon has designated Tencent as a Chinese military company.
With its access into China’s surveillance and security networks and its unrestricted data harvesting, (DeepSeek) can serve as an open-source intelligence tool pumping American users’ data into an opponent’s system,” the report, written by the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, said.
The danger is clear: millions of Americans are now using an AI system designed to serve the CCP. Beijing isn’t just censoring the internet within China, it’s taking its Great Firewall to platforms Americans use every day,” it said.
