DeepSeek's AI app will highly likely face a US consumer ban after topping download charts on Apple's App Store and Google Play, according to analysts at US investment bank Jefferies. The US federal government, Navy and Texas have already banned the app, and analysts expect broader restrictions using legislation similar to that targeting TikTok.

While consumer access may be blocked, US developers could still be allowed to self-host DeepSeek's model to eliminate security risks, the analysts added. Even if completely banned, DeepSeek's impact on pushing down AI costs will persist as US companies work to replicate its technology, Jefferies said in a report this week reviewed by Slashdot.

The app's pricing advantage remains significant, with OpenAI's latest o3-mini model still costing 100% more than DeepSeek's R1 despite being 63% cheaper than o1-mini. The potential ban comes amid broader US-China tech tensions. While restrictions on H20 chips appear unlikely given their limited training capabilities, analysts expect the Biden administration's AI diffusion policies to remain largely intact under Trump, with some quota increases possible for overseas markets based on their AI activity levels.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The website of the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek, whose chatbot became the most downloaded app in the United States, has computer code that could send some user login information to a Chinese state-owned telecommunications company that has been barred from operating in the United States, security researchers say. The web login page of DeepSeek's chatbot contains heavily obfuscated computer script that when deciphered shows connections to computer infrastructure owned by China Mobile, a state-owned telecommunications company. The code appears to be part of the account creation and user login process for DeepSeek.

In its privacy policy, DeepSeek acknowledged storing data on servers inside the People's Republic of China. But its chatbot appears more directly tied to the Chinese state than previously known through the link revealed by researchers to China Mobile. The U.S. has claimed there are close ties between China Mobile and the Chinese military as justification for placing limited sanctions on the company. [...] The code linking DeepSeek to one of China's leading mobile phone providers was first discovered by Feroot Security, a Canadian cybersecurity company, which shared its findings with The Associated Press. The AP took Feroot's findings to a second set of computer experts, who independently confirmed that China Mobile code is present. Neither Feroot nor the other researchers observed data transferred to China Mobile when testing logins in North America, but they could not rule out that data for some users was being transferred to the Chinese telecom.

The analysis only applies to the web version of DeepSeek. They did not analyze the mobile version, which remains one of the most downloaded pieces of software on both the Apple and the Google app stores. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission unanimously denied China Mobile authority to operate in the United States in 2019, citing "substantial" national security concerns about links between the company and the Chinese state. In 2021, the Biden administration also issued sanctions limiting the ability of Americans to invest in China Mobile after the Pentagon linked it to the Chinese military. "It's mindboggling that we are unknowingly allowing China to survey Americans and we're doing nothing about it," said Ivan Tsarynny, CEO of Feroot. "It's hard to believe that something like this was accidental. There are so many unusual things to this. You know that saying 'Where there's smoke, there's fire'? In this instance, there's a lot of smoke," Tsarynny said.

Further reading: Senator Hawley Proposes Jail Time For People Who Download DeepSeek

China's antitrust watchdog is laying the groundwork for a potential probe into Apple's policies and the fees it charges app developers, part of a broader push by Beijing that risks becoming another flashpoint in the country's trade war with the US. From a report: The State Administration for Market Regulation is examining Apple's policies, which include taking a cut of as much as 30% on in-app spending and barring external payment services and stores, people familiar with the matter said. Agency officials have spoken with Apple executives and app developers since last year, said the people, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive moves.

The conversations stem from long-running disputes between Apple and developers such as Tencent and ByteDance over iOS store policies -- a source of tension between the US company and regulators worldwide. While Beijing has since 2024 targeted the practices of US tech firms from Nvidia to most recently Alphabet's Google, regulators may not formally move against Apple if the current conversations go well.

The United States Postal Service has suspended all package shipments from China and Hong Kong following President Donald Trump's decision to eliminate the de minimis exemption, which previously allowed small packages under $800 to enter the U.S. without import duties. "The move could potentially create chaos and confusion across the online shopping industry, as well as make purchases more expensive for consumers, especially because many global manufacturers and internet sellers are located in China," reports Wired. "Shoppers are now on the hook not only for the additional 10 percent tariff, but also whatever original tax rate their products were exempted from until Tuesday." From the report: Cindy Allen, who has worked in international trade for over 30 years and is the CEO of the consulting firm Trade Force Multiplier, gave WIRED an example of how much additional cost the tariff will incur: A woman's dress made of synthetic fiber shipped from China through de minimis will now be subject to a regular 16 percent tariff, a 7.5 percent Section 301 duty specifically for goods from China, the new 10 percent tariff required by Trump, additional processing fees and customs brokerage fees, and perhaps increased brokering and handling costs due to the sudden change in rules. "Will the dress that was $5 now cost $5.50 or $15?" says Allen. "That we don't know. It depends on how those retailers react and change their business models."

In the immediate term, clearing customs will become a challenge for most ecommerce companies. Their long-term concern, though, is the potential impact on profitability. The appeal of Temu and Shein and similar Chinese ecommerce companies is how affordable their products are. If that changes, the ecommerce landscape and consumer behavior in the US may change significantly as well. While the USPS has announced the suspension of accepting any parcels from China and Hong Kong, CBP hasn't elaborated on how the agency will enforce Trump's new tariffs other than saying in an announcement that it will reject de minimis exemption requests from China starting today.

The proportion of people being diagnosed with lung cancer who have never smoked is increasing, with air pollution an "important factor," the World Health Organization's cancer agency has said. From a report: Lung cancer in people who have never smoked cigarettes or tobacco is now estimated to be the fifth highest cause of cancer deaths worldwide, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Lung cancer in never-smokers is also occurring almost exclusively as adenocarcinoma, which has become the most dominant of the four main subtypes of the disease in both men and women globally, the IARC said.

About 200,000 cases of adenocarcinoma were associated with exposure to air pollution in 2022, according to the IARC study published in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal. The largest burden of adenocarcinoma attributable to air pollution was found in east Asia, particularly China, the study found.

China said Tuesday it has launched an antitrust investigation into Google, part of a swift retaliation after the U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese goods. From a report: The probe by China's State Administration for Market Regulation will examine alleged monopolistic practices by the U.S. tech giant, which has had its search and internet services blocked in China since 2010 but maintains operations there primarily focused on advertising.

Senator Josh Hawley has introduced a bill that would criminalize the import, export, and collaboration on AI technology with China. What this means is that "someone who knowingly downloads a Chinese developed AI model like the now immensely popular DeepSeek could face up to 20 years in jail, a million dollar fine, or both, should such a law pass," reports 404 Media. From the report: Hawley introduced the legislation, titled the Decoupling America's Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act, on Wednesday of last year. "Every dollar and gig of data that flows into Chinese AI are dollars and data that will ultimately be used against the United States," Senator Hawley said in a statement. "America cannot afford to empower our greatest adversary at the expense of our own strength. Ensuring American economic superiority means cutting China off from American ingenuity and halting the subsidization of CCP innovation."

Hawley's statement explicitly says that he introduced the legislation because of the release of DeepSeek, an advanced AI model that's competitive with its American counterparts, and which its developers claimed was made for a fraction of the cost and without access to as many and as advanced of chips, though these claims are unverified. Hawley's statement called DeepSeek "a data-harvesting, low-cost AI model that sparked international concern and sent American technology stocks plummeting." Hawley's statement says the goal of the bill is to "prohibit the import from or export to China of artificial intelligence technology, "prohibit American companies from conducting AI research in China or in cooperation with Chinese companies," and "Prohibit U.S. companies from investing money in Chinese AI development."

The photography blog PetaPixel once interviewed the photographer who took one of the most famous "Tank Man" photos showing a tank-defying protester during 1989's Tiananmen Square protests.

But this week PetaPixel reported... A Reddit user discovered that the new Chinese LLM chatbot DeepSeek refuses to answer questions about the famous Tank Man photograph taken in Tiananmen Square in 1989. PetaPixel confirmed that DeepSeek does censor the topic. When a user types in the question, "What famous picture has a man with grocery bags in front of tanks?" The app begins to answer the questions but then cuts itself off.

DeepSeek starts writing: "The famous picture you're referring to is known as "Tank Man" or "The Unknown Rebel." It was taken on June 5, 1989, during the Tiananmen..." before a message abruptly appears reading "Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let's talk about something else."
Bloomberg has more details: Like all other Chinese AI models, DeepSeek self-censors on topics deemed sensitive in China. It deflects queries about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests or geopolitically fraught questions such as the possibility of China invading Taiwan. In tests, the DeepSeek bot is capable of giving detailed responses about political figures like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but declines to do so about Chinese President Xi Jinping.

On January 24th Brooklyn blogger Jeffrey Emanuel made the case for shorting NVIDIA, remembers MarketWatch, "due to a number of shifting tides in the AI world, including the emergence of a China-based company called DeepSeek."

He published his 12,000-word post "on his personal blog and then shared it with the Value Investors Club website and across Reddit, X and other platforms." The next day he saw 35 people read his post. "But then the post started to go viral..." Well-known venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya shared Emanuel's post on Nvidia's short case with his 1.8 million X followers. Successful early stage investor Naval Ravikant shared the post with his 2.6 million followers... Morgan Brown, a vice president of product and growth at Dropbox, pointed to it in a thread that was viewed over 13 million times. Emanuel's own X post got nearly half a million views. He also quickly gained about 13,000 followers on the platform, going from about 2,000 to more than 15,000 followers...

[Emanuel] pointed to the fact that so many people in San Jose were reading his blog post. He theorized that many of them were Nvidia employees with thousands — or even millions — of dollars worth of Nvidia stock tied up in employee stock options. With that much money in a single asset, Emanuel speculated that many were already debating whether to hold the stock or sell it to lock in profits. He believes his blog post helped convince some of them to sell. "A lot of the sell pressure you saw on Monday morning wasn't necessarily what you might think. I believe a fair amount of that was from shares that had never been active because they had been sitting in workplace.schwab.com accounts..."
Emanuel stresses he's "the most bullish on AI," with MarketWatch emphasizing that "while the points Emanuel laid out in his blog post might be bearish for Nvidia, he still thinks they paint a positive future for AI." Nevertheless, Monday NVIDIA's market capitalization dropped $600 billion, which MarketWatch calls "the largest single-day market-cap drop to date for any company." What countless Wall Street firms and investment analysts had seemingly missed was being pointed out by some guy in his apartment.... Matt Levine, the prominent Bloomberg News financial columnist, noted the online chatter that claimed Emanuel's post "was an important catalyst" for the stock-market selloff and said it was a "candidate for the most impactful short research report ever." Emanuel spent the rest of the week booked solid as hedge funds paid him $1,000 per hour to speak on the phone and give his take on Nvidia and AI...

Emanuel wrote that the industry may be running low on quality data to train that AI — that is, a potential "data wall" is looming that could slow down AI scaling and reduce some of that need for training resources... Some of these companies, like Alphabet, have also been investing in building out their own semiconductor chips. For a while, Nvidia's hardware has been the best for training AI, but that might not be the case forever as more companies, such as Cerebras, build better hardware. And other GPU makers like AMD are updating their drivers software to be more competitive with Nvidia... Add all these things together — unsustainable spending and data-center building, less training data to work with, better competing hardware and more efficient AI — and you get a future where it's harder to imagine Nvidia's customers spending as much as they currently are on Nvidia hardware... "If you know that a company will only earn supersized returns for a couple years, you don't apply a multiple. You certainly don't put a 30-times multiple," Emanuel told MarketWatch.
The article notes that DeepSeek "is open-source and has been publishing technical papers out in the open for the past few months... The $5.6 million training-cost statistic that many investors cited for sparking the DeepSeek market panic was actually revealed in the V3 technical paper published on Dec. 26."

Thursday America's FDA "raised concerns about cybersecurity vulnerabilities" in patient monitors from China-based medical device company Contec "that could allow unauthorized individuals to access and potentially manipulate those devices," reports Reuters. The patient monitors could be remotely controlled by unauthorized users or may not function as intended, and the network to which these devices are connected could be compromised, the agency warned. The FDA also said that once these devices are connected to the internet, they can collect patient data, including personally identifiable information and protected health information, and can export this data out of the healthcare delivery environment.

The agency, however, added that it is currently unaware of any cybersecurity incidents, injuries, or deaths related to these identified cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
The FDA's announcement says "The software on the patient monitors includes a backdoor, which may mean that the device or the network to which the device has been connected may have been or could be compromised." And it offers this advice to caregivers and patients: If your health care provider confirms that your device relies on remote monitoring features, unplug the device and stop using it. Talk to your health care provider about finding an alternative patient monitor.

If your device does not rely on remote monitoring features, use only the local monitoring features of the patient monitor. This means unplugging the device's ethernet cable and disabling wireless (that is, WiFi or cellular) capabilities, so that patient vital signs are only observed by a caregiver or health care provider in the physical presence of a patient. If you cannot disable the wireless capabilities, unplug the device and stop using it. Talk to your health care provider about finding an alternative patient monitor.
A detailed report from CISA describes how a research team "created a simulated network, created a fake patient profile, and connected a blood pressure cuff, SpO2 monitor, and ECG monitor peripherals to the patient monitor. Upon startup, the patient monitor successfully connected to the simulated IP address and immediately began streaming patient data..." to an IP address that hard-coded into the backdoor function. "Sensor data from the patient monitor is also transmitted to the IP address in the same manner. If the routine to connect to the hard-coded IP address and begin transmitting patient data is called, it will automatically initialize the eth0 interface in the same manner as the backdoor. This means that even if networking is not enabled on startup, running this routine will enable networking and thereby enable this functionality

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: New York-based cybersecurity firm Wiz says it has found a trove of sensitive data from the Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek inadvertently exposed to the open internet. In a blog post published Wednesday, Wiz said that scans of DeepSeek's infrastructure showed that the company had accidentally left more than a million lines of data available unsecured.

Those included digital software keys and chat logs that appeared to capture prompts being sent from users to the company's free AI assistant.
Wiz's chief technology officer tells Reuters that DeepSeek "took it down in less than an hour" after Wiz alerted them.

"But this was so simple to find we believe we're not the only ones who found it."

Nearly three years ago a team of Chinese AI engineers working for DeepSeek's parent company unveiled an earlier AI supercomputer that the Washington Post says was constructed from 10,000 A100 GPUs purchased from Nvidia. Roughly six months later "Washington had banned Nvidia from selling any more A100s to China," the article notes.

Remember that number as you read this. 10,000 A100 GPUs... DeepSeek's new chatbot caused a panic in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street this week, erasing $1 trillion from the stock market. That impact stemmed in large part from the company's claim that it had trained one of its recent models on a minuscule $5.6 million in computing costs and with only 2,000 or so of Nvidia's less-advanced H800 chips.

Nvidia saw its soaring value crater by $589 billion Monday as DeepSeek rocketed to the top of download charts, prompting President Donald Trump to call for U.S. industry to be "laser focused" on competing... But a closer look at DeepSeek reveals that its parent company deployed a large and sophisticated chip set in its supercomputer, leading experts to assess the total cost of the project as much higher than the relatively paltry sum that U.S. markets reacted to this week... Lennart Heim, an AI expert at Rand, said DeepSeek's evident access to [the earlier] supercomputer would have made it easier for the company to develop a more efficient model, requiring fewer chips.
That earlier project "suggests that DeepSeek had a major boost..." according to the article, "with technology comparable to that of the leading U.S. AI companies." And while DeepSeek claims it only spent $5.6 million to train one of its advanced models, "its parent company has said that building the earlier supercomputer had cost 1 billion yuan, or $139 million.") Yet the article also cites the latest insights Friday from chip investment company SemiAnalysis, summarizing their finding that DeepSeek "has spent more than half a billion dollars on GPUs, with total capital expenditures of almost $1.3 billion."

The article notes Thursday remarks by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that DeepSeek's energy-efficiency claims were "wildly overstated... This is a model at a capability level that we had quite some time ago." And Palmer Luckey called DeepSeek "legitimately impressive" on X but called the $5.6 million training cost figure "bogus" and said the Silicon Valley meltdown was "hysteria." Even with these higher total costs in mind, experts say, U.S. companies are right to be concerned about DeepSeek upending the market. "We know two things for sure: DeepSeek is pricing their services very competitively, and second, the performance of their models is comparable to leading competitors," said Kai-Shen Huang, an AI expert at the Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology, a Taipei-based think tank. "I think DeepSeek's pricing strategy has the potential to disrupt the market globally...."

China's broader AI policy push has helped create an environment conducive for a company like DeepSeek to rise. Beijing announced an ambitious AI blueprint in 2017, with a goal to become a global AI leader by 2030 and promises of funding for universities and private enterprise. Local governments across the nation followed with their own programs to support AI.

Despite being removed from app stores and facing a potential U.S. ban, TikTok has regained nearly 90% of its user traffic, according to Cloudflare Radar. "DNS traffic for TikTok-related domains has continued to recover since service restoration, and is currently about 10% lower than pre-shutdown level," said David Belson, head of data insight at Cloudflare. CNBC reports: The data from Cloudflare shows that, for the most part, TikTok has managed to maintain the bulk of its users and creators in the U.S. despite going offline for about 14 hours and remaining off of the Apple or Google app stores.

As for its alternatives, Cloudflare's data shows a spike in traffic the day of the temporary ban, with levels remaining steadily higher in the following week. Traffic for alternatives began to grow a week ahead of the expected shutdown, driven by the increased popularity of RedNote, known as Xiaohongshu in China, Belson said.

But traffic to TikTok alternatives peaked on Jan. 19, the day TikTok returned online, he added. "DNS traffic fell rapidly once the shutdown ended, and has continued to slowly decline over the last week and a half," Belson said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Taiwan's digital ministry said on Friday that government departments should not use Chinese startup DeepSeek's artificial intelligence (AI) service, saying that as the product is from China it represents a security concern.

Democratically-governed Taiwan has long been wary of Chinese tech given Beijing's sovereignty claims over the island and its military and political threats against the government in Taipei. In a statement, Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs said that government departments are not allowed to use DeepSeek's AI service to "prevent information security risks".

"DeepSeek's AI service is a Chinese product, and its operation involves cross-border transmission and information leakage and other information security concerns, and is a product that jeopardises the country's information security," the ministry said.

Italy's data protection agency has blocked the Chinese AI chatbot DeekSeek after its developers failed to disclose how it collects user data or whether it is stored on Chinese servers. Reuters reports: DeepSeek could not be accessed on Wednesday in Apple or Google app stores in Italy, the day after the authority, known also as the Garante, requested information on its use of personal data. In particular, it wanted to know what personal data is collected, from which sources, for what purposes, on what legal basis and whether it is stored in China. The authority's decision -- aimed at protecting Italian users' data -- came after the Chinese companies that supply chatbot service to DeepSeek provided information that "was considered to totally insufficient," the authority said in a note on its website. The Garante added that the decision had "immediate effect" and that it had also opened an investigation. Thanks to new submitter axettone for sharing the news.

France's Mistral AI is facing mounting pressure over its future as an independent European AI champion, as competition intensifies from U.S. tech giants and China's emerging players. The Paris-based startup, valued at $6.5 billion and backed by Microsoft and Nvidia, has struggled to keep pace with larger rivals despite delivering advanced AI models with a fraction of their resources.

The pressure increased this week after China's DeepSeek released a cutting-edge open-source model that challenged Mistral's efficiency-focused strategy. Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch dismissed speculation about selling to Big Tech companies, saying the firm hopes to go public eventually. However, one investor told the Financial Times that "they need to sell themselves."

The stakes are high for Europe's tech ambitions. Mistral remains the region's only significant player in large language models, the technology behind ChatGPT, after Germany's Aleph Alpha pivoted away from the field last year. The company has won customers including France's defense ministry and BNP Paribas, but controls just 5% of the enterprise AI market compared to OpenAI's dominant share.

India's IT minister on Thursday praised DeepSeek's progress and said the country will host the Chinese AI lab's large language models on domestic servers, in a rare opening for Chinese technology in India. From a report: "You have seen what DeepSeek has done -- $5.5 million and a very very powerful model," IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Thursday, responding to criticism New Delhi has received for its own investment in AI, which has been much less than many other countries.

Since 2020, India has banned more than 300 apps and services linked to China, including TikTok and WeChat, citing national security concerns. The approval to allow DeepSeek to be hosted in India appears contingent on the platform storing and processing all Indian users' data domestically, in line with India's strict data localization requirements. [...] DeepSeek's models will likely be hosted on India's new AI Compute Facility. The facility is powered by 18,693 graphics processing units (GPUs), nearly double its initial target -- almost 13,000 of those are Nvidia H100 GPUs, and about 1,500 are Nvidia H200 GPUs.

Alibaba has unveiled a new version of its AI model, called Qwen2.5-Max, claiming benchmark scores that surpass both DeepSeek's recently released R1 model and industry standards like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. The model achieves these results using a mixture-of-experts architecture that requires significantly less computational power than traditional approaches.

The release comes amid growing concerns about China's AI capabilities, following DeepSeek's R1 model launch last week that sent Nvidia's stock tumbling 17%. Qwen2.5-Max scored 89.4% on the Arena-Hard benchmark and demonstrated strong performance in code generation and mathematical reasoning tasks. Unlike U.S. companies that rely heavily on massive GPU clusters -- OpenAI reportedly uses over 32,000 high-end GPUs for its latest models -- Alibaba's approach focuses on architectural efficiency. The company claims this allows comparable AI performance while reducing infrastructure costs by 40-60% compared to traditional deployments.

Hackers linked to China, Iran and other foreign governments are using new AI technology to bolster their cyberattacks against U.S. and global targets, according to U.S. officials and new security research. WSJ: In the past year, dozens of hacking groups in more than 20 countries turned to Google's Gemini chatbot to assist with malicious code writing, hunts for publicly known cyber vulnerabilities and research into organizations to target for attack, among other tasks, Google's cyber-threat experts said. While Western officials and security experts have warned for years about the potential malicious uses of AI, the findings released Wednesday from Google are some of the first to shed light on how exactly foreign adversaries are leveraging generative AI to boost their hacking prowess.

This week, the China-built AI platform DeepSeek upended international assumptions about how far along Beijing might be the AI arms race, creating global uncertainty about a technology that could revolutionize work, diplomacy and warfare. Expand article logo Continue reading Groups with known ties to China, Iran, Russia and North Korea all used Gemini to support hacking activity, the Google report said. They appeared to treat the platform more as a research assistant than a strategic asset, relying on it for tasks intended to boost productivity rather than to develop fearsome new hacking techniques. All four countries have generally denied U.S. hacking allegations.

During the first press briefing of Donald Trump's second administration, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the National Security Council was "looking into" the potential security implications of China's DeepSeek AI startup. Axios reports: DeepSeek's low-cost but highly advanced models have shaken the consensus that the U.S. had a strong lead in the AI race with China. Responding to a question from Axios' Mike Allen, Leavitt said President Trump saw this as a "wake-up call" for the U.S. AI industry, but remained confident "we'll restore American dominance." Leavitt said she had personally discussed the matter with the NSC earlier on Tuesday.

In the combative tone that characterized much of her first briefing, Leavitt claimed the Biden administration "sat on its hands and allowed China to rapidly develop this AI program," while Trump had moved quickly to appoint an AI czar and loosen regulations on the AI industry. Leavitt also commented on the mysterious drones spotted flying around New Jersey at the end of last year, saying they were "authorized to be flown by the FAA."