Seoul, South Korea: South Korea will ask Chinese AI startup DeepSeek to clarify how it manages users’ personal information, its data watchdog said Friday, joining a number of countries seeking answers.
DeepSeek launched its R1 chatbot this month, claiming it matches the capacity of artificial intelligence pace-setters in the United States for a fraction of the investment.
The news sparked a rout in tech titans — Nvidia dived 17 percent Monday — and raised questions about the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI in recent years.
But countries now including South Korea, France, Australia and Italy have questions about DeepSeek’s data practices.
“We intend to submit our request in writing as early as Friday to obtain information about how DeepSeek handles personal data,” an official from South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission told AFP, without giving further details.
-‘Be very careful’-
Italy launched an investigation this week into the R1 model and blocked it from processing Italian users’ data.
The Italian Data Protection Agency is asking what information is used to train DeepSeek’s AI system and, if the data is scraped from the internet, how users are informed about the processing of their data.
French watchdog CNIL also said it would question DeepSeek about its chatbot “to better understand the way it works and the risks regarding data protection”.
On Tuesday, Australia’s science minister Ed Husic raised privacy concerns over the company’s AI service and urged users to think carefully before downloading it.
“There are a lot of questions that will need to be answered in time on quality, consumer preferences, data and privacy management,” Husic told national broadcaster ABC.