Tuesday 8 April 2025
South Korea Bans Local Uses of Chinese app DeepSeek
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The South Korean government on Monday said it has suspended the use of theChinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek.in the country.South Korea’sPersonal Information Protection Commission (PIPC)justified its decision on the grounds of concerns about the AI chatbot’s data collection practices.
The commission said it suspended DeepSeek’s local service at 6 pm (09:00 GMT) on Saturday and that it would be back online after “improvements and remedies” are made in line with the country’s personal information protection laws. According to the PIPC, DeepSeek is currently actively cooperating with the data protection authority.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has challenged the dominance of top AI companies with its latest large language models, which offer similar performance to the latest offerings from Meta or OpenAI, but at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek’s free app has also taken over ChatGPT on Apple’s App Store in several regions including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, China and Singapore.
DeepSeek AI was founded by Liang Wenfeng in May 2023, but it gained the limelight in early 2025 – all thanks to its latest developed large language models (LLMs) – DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1. They are designed to be both efficient and cost-effective.
To be precise, DeepSeek-V3 is a general-purpose model, while DeepSeek-R1 focuses on tasks requiring reasoning and deeper thinking. Both the models have delivered impressive benchmarks and use fewer resources compared to their rivals.
Concerns about DeepSeek stem from its storage of user data on servers in China. Under Chinese laws, this data could be passed on to government agencies on request, which violates data protection laws such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Security researchers have also identified weaknesses such as inadequate encryption and other security gaps that could jeopardize sensitive data.
The app can also be easily manipulated to produce content that is potentially dangerous, such as instructions on how to build a bomb. Several countries have already taken action against DeepSeek.
Apart from South Korea, Taiwan and Australia have also banned it from all government official devices. The Australian government has insisted its ban is not due to the app’s Chinese origins, but because of the “unacceptable risk” it poses to national security.
Italy’s regulator, which briefly banned ChatGPT in 2023, has done the same with DeepSeek. There is no nationwide ban in the United States, but several federal agencies such as NASA and the Department of Defense have banned their employees from using the app.
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