Private Data Safety Fee says AI mannequin despatched private information to Beijing-based cloud service.
South Korea’s information safety watchdog has accused DeepSeek, the Chinese language start-up whose synthetic intelligence-powered chatbot took the tech scene by storm earlier this yr, of transferring private information with out customers’ consent.
The Private Data Safety Fee stated on Thursday that DeepSeek had been transferring info to a number of firms in China and the USA earlier than its ChatGPT-like AI mannequin was faraway from app shops in February, pending a privateness overview.
Nam Seok, director of the fee’s investigation bureau, stated throughout a information convention that the app had despatched person prompts and machine and community info to a Beijing-based cloud service referred to as Volcano Engine.
DeepSeek “acknowledged it had insufficiently thought of Korea’s information safety legal guidelines” and “expressed its willingness to cooperate with the fee, and voluntarily suspended new downloads”, Nam stated.
DeepSeek didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Following the South Korean watchdog’s announcement, China’s Ministry of Overseas Affairs stated it positioned a excessive degree of significance on information privateness and safety.
“We’ve got by no means – and can by no means – require firms or people to gather or retailer information via unlawful means,” ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun stated throughout a daily information convention.
DeepSeek’s R1 prompted a sensation in January after its builders launched a analysis paper claiming they spent lower than $6m on computing energy to coach the mannequin – a fraction of the multibillion-dollar AI budgets of US tech giants corresponding to OpenAI and Google.
The emergence of a Chinese language startup able to rivalling Silicon Valley’s main gamers challenged assumptions about US dominance in AI and prompted scrutiny of the sky-high market valuations of firms corresponding to Nvidia and Meta.
Marc Andreessen, some of the influential tech enterprise capitalists in Silicon Valley, hailed DeepSeek’s mannequin as “AI’s Sputnik second”.
