New York: Three weeks ago, millions of users around the world eagerly downloaded the DeepSeek application, an AI chatbot touted as a more cost-effective and powerful alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT. With its advanced capabilities, lower cost, and open-source accessibility, DeepSeek quickly became the most downloaded free app on Apple's App Store, triggering excitement and anxiety in equal measure.

According to Anadolu Agency, soon after its widespread adoption, several countries - including Italy, South Korea, and Taiwan - began imposing bans on the Chinese AI platform, citing national security concerns and data privacy risks. The latest to join the growing list is the US, where the states of Texas, New York, and Virginia have prohibited government employees from downloading and using DeepSeek on state-owned devices and networks. The move follows similar restrictions in Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia, as Western governments question the security implications of allowing a Chinese AI model to collect and process user data.

Despite the bans, experts argue that DeepSeek marks a significant challenge to the US' longstanding dominance in the AI sector. Some even suggest that Washington and its allies are reacting out of fear rather than genuine security threats. 'The combination of low development costs, faster responses, accuracy, affordability, and open-source accessibility makes DeepSeek an attractive alternative to more established generative AI tools such as ChatGPT,' said Harin Sellahewa, dean of the Faculty of Computing, Law, and Psychology at the University of Buckingham.

DeepSeek claims to have built its chatbot with a fraction of the budget and resources typically required to train similar models. While leading AI firms use over 16,000 high-performance chips to develop their models, DeepSeek reportedly used just 2,000 older-generation chips and operated on a budget of less than $6 million. Explaining the platform's underlying technology, Sellahewa said: 'DeepSeek, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, is a generative AI tool capable of creating text, images, programming code, and solving mathematical problems.'

However, what sets DeepSeek apart is its use of the Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, which enables the AI model 'to consult many experts from various disciplines and domains' within its framework to generate a response. In terms of accuracy, DeepSeek's responses are generally on par with competitors, although it has shown to be better at some tasks, but not all.

DeepSeek's rapid adoption and performance against competitors such as OpenAI and Google sent shockwaves through the tech industry. Following its launch, major US tech stocks saw sharp declines, with chipmaker Nvidia alone reportedly losing nearly $600 billion in market value. For Dana McKay, associate dean of Interaction, Technology, and Information at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), DeepSeek's impact can be attributed to two key factors: its billing as open source and its ownership by a Chinese company, which comes with certain laws on data storage.

Several countries have moved swiftly to ban or restrict DeepSeek, particularly for government employees. Italy was the first country in Europe to remove the chatbot from app stores, citing concerns over how user data was collected, stored, and used. South Korea, Australia, and Taiwan have also barred government officials from using DeepSeek due to security risks. Last week, the Netherlands became the latest to ban DeepSeek for civil servants, citing potential espionage threats.

China has criticized the bans as an 'overstretching' of the concept of national security, with the Foreign Ministry reiterating that Beijing 'attaches great importance to data privacy and security and protects it in accordance with the law.' McKay believes that there are valid security risks associated with the use of DeepSeek, given the large amount of data it collects. This level of information could lead the Chinese government to know an awful lot about the movements of individuals.

At the same time, experts pointed out that Western AI models such as ChatGPT and Google's Gemini also collect vast amounts of user data, raising questions about whether bans on DeepSeek are justified solely on security grounds. Padmanabhan agreed, asserting that all generative AI technologies, not just DeepSeek, collect data at 'a very fine-grained level.' It is not very obvious as to why DeepSeek collecting data is qualitatively any different from OpenAI or Google collecting data.