DeepSeek was downloaded by millions. Deleting it might come next

Plenty of Americans are discovering the AI search powers of DeepSeek, the breakthrough Chinese generative AI app that surged to No. 1 downloaded status on Apple’s App Store last week. But in an era of U.S.-China technology rivalry and mistrust, and entities from NASA to the U.S. Navy and Taiwanese government prohibiting use of DeepSeek within days, is it wise of millions of Americans to let the app start playing around with their personal search inquiries?

The sudden rise of DeepSeek — created on a rapid timeline and on a budget reportedly much lower than previously thought possible — caught AI experts off guard, though skepticism over the claims remain and some estimates suggest the Chinese company understated costs by hundreds of millions of dollars. Privacy advocates were caught off guard, too, and their concerns aren’t predicated on AI development costs, and they already warning that Americans are putting themselves and their privacy at risk.

The amount of data and information that bad actors in China could harvest from DeepSeek is 20 times worse than what could be collected from a Google search, says Dewardric McNeal, managing director and senior policy analyst at risk management firm Longview Global, which advises companies on China strategy.

“It is a rich trove of intelligence,” said McNeal, who has studied the details of Chinese government data sharing requirements for domestic firms.

There are obvious risks, he said, such as personal banking or health information that can be stolen, and prominent cybersecurity firms are already reporting vulnerabilities in DeepSeek. DeepSeek itself reported being hit with a major cyberattack last week.

But McNeal is just as worried about the “bigger picture” competition between nations.

“I want us to speak broader than just the narrow data; we often don’t speak about the degree to which this information paints a mental map through understanding queries,” McNeal said.

For example, Chinese intelligence could use the broader patterns of queries in DeepSeek to learn about various American industries and to sow division among the public.

“The world won’t end tomorrow because I logged into DeepSeek,” McNeal said, but he added that does not mean there isn’t considerable risk involved. The AI’s open-source approach, for one, could give China access to US-based supply chains at an industry level, allowing them to learn what companies are doing and better compete against them. “National security professionals are thinking about it in those terms,” McNeal said.

Matt Pearl, a special advisor to the deputy national security advisor at the National Security Council in the Biden administration and now the Strategic Technologies Program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said DeepSeek’s privacy policy implies that people have control over what is collected, but it should induce alarm.

“DeepSeek’s privacy policy is not worth the paper it is written on,” Pearl said. DeepSeek is subjected to PRC laws and anything entered into the app is fair game. Through keystroke patterns, a DeepSeek user can be tracked across all devices, information gathered from advertisers, and DeepSeek could also seek to leverage cameras and microphones, according to Pearl.

“If they can do it technically in the app and the PRC determines it is something they want to do, then it poses a danger,” Pearl said.

But the threat that Pearl said most keeps him up at night is related to cybersecurity and the potential for a mass malware injection. “It is hard to emphasize all the different potential ways in which it could be used. And, in theory, it could be done in a single update to the app,” he said.

Officials at High Flyer, the Chinese-backed hedge fund which created DeepSeek, did not respond to a request for comment.

ChatGPT still far ahead of DeepSeek

Despite the outsized impact on the markets and leading AI firms including Nvidia, DeepSeek still has a long way to go to catch up to rival ChatGPT, which is continuing to raise a formidable war chest — a few days after the DeepSeek headlines dominated the tech and markets news cycle, OpenAI was reportedly in talks for a $40 billion funding round.

DeepSeek remains far behind ChatGPT in consumer activity, according to online analytics platform Semrush, with the OpenAI app maintaining an average daily visit count in the tens of millions. But ChatGPT has experienced a recent dip in traffic — it had 22.1 million visitors on October 1, 2024, but that had declined to 14.9 million by January 19, according to Semrush. At the same time, even before it became a major national news story, DeepSeek’s online footprint was growing — from 2.3K average U.S. daily visits on October 1, 2024, to 71.2K by January 19 (a week before it caused the stock market to tank).

Joe Jones, director of research and insights for The International Association of Privacy Professionals, a policy-neutral nonprofit that promotes privacy and AI governance, says that disruptors like DeepSeek can make the organization’s job more difficult.

“It is challenging for people to do that work when you have proliferating laws that are complex, diverse, and often in tension, and technologies like DeepSeek that come at you from left field, upend status quos and make you rethink good governance,” Jones said. The fact that the debate is playing out across borders makes it more contentious. “This has gotten a whole lot more complex in this turbocharged geopolitical environment,” Jones added.

The challenges will not be solved any time soon, according to Brendan Englot, director of the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the Stevens Institute of Technology. “AI is now a global international competition, and we will see breakthroughs all over the world,” Englot said.

The open-source technology approach leveraged by DeepSeek — an approach promoted by Meta — means more DeepSeeks are coming. “There will be many more disruptions just like this one shortly,” Englot said.

For consumers, the tradeoffs will need to be navigated with an understanding of the data implications. The tools are being designed to improve lives by increasing efficiency and creativity. “So it is tempting to share our data, but you have to assume it is fair game to be used once you do,” Englot said.

DeepSeek’s success suggests that export controls on advanced chips intended to slow Chinese AI efforts might need to be even stricter, but are also no silver bullet. “To be clear, they’re not a way to duck the competition between the US and China,” wrote Dario Amodei, CEO of gen AI startup Anthropic, in a blog post this week. “In the end, AI companies in the US and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail. But we shouldn’t hand the Chinese Communist Party technological advantages when we don’t have to.”

Pearl says it may ultimately fall to the U.S. government to regulate or legislate.

“The government has the ability under the same law that they had to ban TikTok; they can ban DeepSeek. The law that was passed doesn’t just apply to TikTok,” Pearl said, citing provisions of the law related to a company controlled by a foreign adversary, or deemed by the U.S. president to be a threat to national security. Pearl thinks that despite President Trump’s backing away from a TikTok ban, US-based tech companies will likely lobby harder when it comes to AI.

“I think you will see U.S. tech companies lobbying the admin hard on this and saying DeepSeek will corner the AI market, and it is critical to have U.S. companies at the forefront,” Pearl said. “Trump will hear from them at the highest levels. China has made champions by keeping the USA out of their markets, why should we allow them to dominate our markets?”