The Chinese Communist government threw a fit Tuesday after South Korea banned China’s new DeepSeek artificial intelligence (AI) on security and data privacy grounds.
Beijing accused Seoul of “politicizing” technology, even though the Koreans caught DeepSeek red-handed sending the personal data of its users back to China.
South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) said Monday that it found “DeepSeek’s user data was leaked to ByteDance.”
“When users accessed DeepSeek, their information was being passed on to ByteDance as well,” PIPC said.
ByteDance is the Chinese tech giant that became infamous by creating another popular app that harvests data about its users: TikTok. There is no obvious reason why DeepSeek, which is not a ByteDance product, would be sending user data back to a third party in China.
The South Korean PIPC’s discovery did not come as a shock to cybersecurity analysts, who quickly found numerous security problems with the DeepSeek app after the AI’s splashy debut in January.
One of those problems was that DeepSeek was harvesting inexplicable amounts of data about its users and shooting off packets of data to several state-owned entities in China. When security analysts pulled the code for the DeepSeek app apart, they discovered numerous references to networks and servers owned by ByteDance.
PIPC said on Monday that it asked DeepSeek to suspend any further downloads of its app in South Korea. The Chinese company voluntarily complied, admitting that it did not follow South Korea’s data privacy laws when designing its software.
PIPC said it would continue investigating the DeepSeek app and would attempt to clarify exactly what data the app is sending back to China. In the meantime, the app is not technically “banned” in South Korea – its downloads for Android and Apple iOS devices have been temporarily halted while “necessary adjustments” are made.
The commission urged users who wish to continue using DeepSeek to “exercise caution and avoid entering personal information into the chatbot.”
“The commission is in the stage of investigation whether DeepSeek poses any harm. A full-scale ban could be controversial before its liability is officially determined,” said PIPC.
A timeline for the investigation was not specified, but PIPC said it intends to discuss DeepSeek’s privacy issues at a conference in Seoul in September.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun slammed South Korea for halting DeepSeek downloads at a press conference on Monday.
“Let me stress that the Chinese government, as always, asks our companies to strictly abide by local laws and regulations in doing business overseas,” Guo insisted, even though DeepSeek’s parent company just admitted they did not do that.
“We also hope that relevant countries can refrain from broadening the concept of national security on trade and tech issues and politicizing them,” he added.
DeepSeek is a very important product for China, which hopes the AI – touted by its creators as comparable to big-name chatbots like ChatGPT in performance but developed at a fraction of the price – will jolt the timid tech sector and moribund economy to life.
DeepSeek won a great deal of international attention when it rolled out, becoming the top app download in the world for a time, but interest cooled considerably as security issues, excessive data harvesting, and heavy corruption by Chinese Communist Party censorship became apparent. Italy banned downloads of the DeepSeek app three weeks ago, on grounds similar to those cited by South Korea.
Furthermore, some AI experts have said DeepSeek’s creation myth is a fabrication and the system actually cost much more to develop than its parent company claimed. ChatGPT creator OpenAI said in early February it found evidence that some of its data was appropriated by DeepSeek, possibly in violation of ChatGPT’s terms of service.
Even with these reservations, DeepSeek still shook the tech world by introducing the possibility that A.I. systems could be developed at much lower prices than previously believed – potentially removing a very high barrier to entry from the hottest new high-tech industry. President Donald Trump has described the launch of the Chinese AI as a “wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing.”
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