> Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd. (hereinafter DeepSeek), a foreign, privately-owned company, located in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides multiple artificial intelligence applications available widely and free of charge. DeepSeek’s models present multiple threat vectors. DeepSeek servers are located in the PRC, and the PRC legal system permits extensive authority to government cyber and intelligence functions to access private company infrastructure. For DeepSeek-hosted instances of their models, DeepSeek’s account generation process collects personally identifiable information (PII) and may also track and digitally fingerprint users. DeepSeek’s most widely used applications function through a prompt-and-response process that requires presenting information to the model, and which may result in the transfer of sensitive data to the PRC if used by U.S. government employees or vendors. The transfer of the aforementioned information to the PRC, either independently or in combination with publicly available data, could produce actionable intelligence on U.S. persons and/or government programs. The models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities. Indeed, open-source security research has found that the DeepSeek iOS mobile application contains multiple critical vulnerabilities.
