DeepSeek: Chinese AI firm on US national security radar

“I spoke with [the National Security Council] this morning, they are looking into what [the national security implications] may be,” said Ms Leavitt, who also restated US President Donald Trump’s remarks a day earlier that DeepSeek should be a wake-up call for the US tech industry.

According to CNBC, the US navy has sent an email to its staff warning them not to use the DeepSeek app due to “potential security and ethical concerns associated with the model’s origin and usage”.

The US Navy did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BBC News.

Speaking on Fox News, the recently appointed “White House AI and crypto czar”, David Sacks, also suggested that DeepSeek may have used the models developed by top US firm OpenAI to get better.

This process – which involves one AI model learning from another – is called knowledge distillation.

“There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models,” Mr Sacks said. “I think one of the things you’re going to see over the next few months is our leading AI companies taking steps to try and prevent distillation… That would definitely slow down some of these copycat models.”

OpenAI echoed this in a later statement that said Chinese and other companies are “constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies.”

“As the leading builder of AI, we engage in countermeasures to protect our [intellectual property]… and believe as we go forward that it is critically important that we are working closely with the U.S. government to best protect the most capable models”.

Meanwhile, DeepSeek says it has been the target of cyber attacks. On Monday it said it would temporarily limit registrations because of “large-scale malicious attacks” on its software.

A banner currently showing on the company’s website says registration may be busy as a result of the attacks.

Yuyuan Tantian, a social media channel under China’s state broadcaster CCTV, claims the firm has faced “several” cyber attacks in recent weeks, which have increased in “intensity”.