The United States may become the second country after Australia to ban China’s DeepSeek artificial intelligence on government devices.
U.S. Representatives Josh Gottheimer and Darin LaHood introduced a bipartisan bill proposing the ban.
In their letter to 47 U.S. governors and the mayor of Washington, the congressmen warned that DeepSeek could pose security risks to sensitive government data and cybersecurity and Americans’ privacy, NBC News reported on March 3.
China denies the allegations. However, concerns highlighted by the U.S. lawmakers and state officials are not without merit, experts say.
The Chinese government has reportedly also used AI models like DeepSeek for mass surveillance, including the collection of biometric data and social media listening models that report to China’s security services and the military, as well as for information attacks on U.S. and Chinese dissidents abroad.
At least three leading Chinese surveillance and security companies — TopSec, QAX and NetEase — announced the integration of DeepSeek to enhance their services.
All three companies provide services to the Chinese government, and some made it clear that DeepSeek will improve their cyber censorship and surveillance capabilities. This includes AI-driven biometric data capturing, face recognition and surveillance technologies such as “smart cities,” the Skynet Project, and the Xueliang Project, which can monitor all aspects of an individual’s public life, Wenhao Ma of VOA’s China Division reported.
In January, Canadian cybersecurity firm Feroot Security uncovered a code imbedded in DeepSeek’s login processes that shares user information with Chinese state-owned communication company China Mobile, AP reported.
The Associated Press described the code as a “heavily obfuscated computer script that when deciphered shows connections to computer infrastructure owned by China Mobile.”
The U.S. banned China Mobile in 2019 following intelligence reports that it serves as the Chinese military’s spy arm.
China-based actors have been using ChatGPT along with DeepSeek models to generate phishing email and disinformation attacks on the U.S. “on behalf of unspecified clients in China,” OpenAI said in its February report.
OpenAI identified and blocked a cluster of China-originated accounts involved in malicious activities, such as Qianyue Overseas Public Opinion AI Assistant, reportedly designed to ingest and analyze posts and comments related to Chinese politics and human rights from platforms such as X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram and Reddit.
The purpose of the operation was reportedly “to feed the resulting insights to the Chinese authorities” such as “Chinese embassies abroad, and to intelligence agents monitoring protests in countries including the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom,” OpenAI said.
A set of ChatGPT accounts that OpenAI banned in February had been involved in Chinese influence operations focused on generating short comments in English and long-form Spanish-language articles critical of the United States published in local and national media outlets across Latin America and Spain.
One of the Chinese companies planting the articles in the Spanish-language outlets was Jilin Yousen Culture Communication Co., a subsidiary of the government-tied Beijing United Publishing House.
VOA reviewed nine of the Chinese AI-generated articles published in Spanish-language media between October and November 2024 as identified by OpenAI.
Two — in Mexico’s El Universal and Peru’s El Popular — criticized the United States’ use of sanctions targeting foreign governments and individuals.
The El Universal op-ed described the U.S. sanctions on Iran’s oil industry for Tehran’s backing of terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah as exposing the U.S.’ “impotence” in dealing with global politics and the “rapid decline” of its “moral standing.”
Similarly, El Popular painted U.S. sanctions on a Hamas affiliate as “insane” and an “attack on the rights of Palestinian people.”
An article in Peru’s La Republica presented the U.S. as the biggest beneficiary of the Russian war in Ukraine, replicating the Kremlin’s key narrative. It criticized the U.S. for providing military aid to Kyiv, framing the American support as an escalation of the war.
China, however, has been a key provider of military technologies and weapons to Russia, which Moscow uses in daily attacks on Ukrainian civilians.
Another China-planted piece in La Republica described U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policy as “undermining U.S. global leadership position.”
Three pieces in Peru’s Wapa, El Popular and El Plural exploited the issues of homelessness, child nutrition and crime in the U.S. — all presented as extremely acute and dangerous.
For example, the child nutrition piece claimed that most children in the U.S. “go hungry on weekends and holidays” due to the government’s neglect of children’s food security.
While the topics of these articles vary from human rights and social issues in the U.S. to foreign and domestic politics, they all paint a picture of a dysfunctional state with failing moral values and declining international influence, matching Beijing’s standard narrative.
…