South Korea’s data protection watchdog has accused DeepSeek, the Chinese start-up whose artificial intelligence-powered chatbot took the tech scene by storm earlier this year, of transferring personal data without users’ consent.
The Personal Information Protection Commission said on Thursday that DeepSeek had been transferring information to several companies in China and the United States before its ChatGPT-like AI model was removed from app stores in February, pending a privacy review.
Nam Seok, director of the commission’s investigation bureau, said during a news conference that the app had sent user prompts and device and network information to a Beijing-based cloud service called Volcano Engine.
DeepSeek “acknowledged it had insufficiently considered Korea’s data protection laws” and “expressed its willingness to cooperate with the commission, and voluntarily suspended new downloads”, Nam said.
DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Following the South Korean watchdog’s announcement, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it placed a high level of importance on data privacy and security.
“We have never – and will never – require companies or individuals to collect or store data through illegal means,” ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said during a regular news conference.
DeepSeek’s R1 caused a sensation in January after its developers released a research paper claiming they spent less than $6m on computing power to train the model – a fraction of the multibillion-dollar AI budgets of US tech giants such as OpenAI and Google.
The emergence of a Chinese startup capable of rivalling Silicon Valley’s leading players challenged assumptions about US dominance in AI and prompted scrutiny of the sky-high market valuations of companies such as Nvidia and Meta.
Marc Andreessen, one of the most influential tech venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, hailed DeepSeek’s model as “AI’s Sputnik moment”.
