US Congressional Special Committee Recognizes DeepSeek as a National Security Threat
A special committee of the US House of Representatives recognized the Chinese company DeepSeek as a potential threat to national security and called on the government to take measures to reduce the risks associated with the use of Chinese artificial intelligence models. About this informs PYMNTS.
In the report, the committee recommends strengthening export controls and preventing strategic threats that may arise from the development of advanced AI technologies.
“This report makes clear that DeepSeek is not just another AI application, but a weapon in the Chinese Communist Party’s arsenal designed to spy on Americans”, said the chairman of the committee, Republican John Mulenaar.
He also noted that the committee has sent a formal request to Nvidia to explain how its chips were used in DeepSeek products.
As part of the investigation, the committee found that DeepSeek was transferring data of US citizens to China through infrastructure linked to China’s military-industrial complex. In addition, DeepSeek’s AI model allegedly biases results to support propaganda narratives supporting the Chinese Communist Party. It has also been suggested that DeepSeek may have used illegal methods, including stealing information from American AI models.
Countries that have already restricted the use of DeepSeek programs cite threats to national security arising from a lack of transparency about the Chinese company’s collection, storage and processing of users’ personal data.
DeepSeek is said to contain hidden code capable of automatically handing over user data to the Chinese government. Although there is no confirmation yet that this is happening in practice, Western governments are concerned that the information collected could be used for espionage, influence operations or digital surveillance.
