Bill threatens to make using DeepSeek a crime for Americans
A proposed new law would make it illegal for Americans to download the popular Chinese AI app DeepSeek. On Monday, Sen. Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, introduced legislation that would "prohibit the import from or export to China of artificial intelligence technology." While the announcement mentions DeepSeek, the bill called the Decoupling America’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act doesn't explicitly mention the Chinese AI company. Instead it speaks more broadly about protecting U.S. intellectual property and preventing a foreign adversary from using technology that undermines national security. SEE ALSO: DeepSeek just taught the AI industry 5 hard lessons "America cannot afford to empower our greatest adversary at the expense of our own strength. Ensuring American economic superiority means cutting China off from American ingenuity and halting the subsidization of CCP innovation," said Hawley in the announcement, before referencing the "international concern" triggered by the launch of DeepSeek's R1 model. In a matter of days, R1's arrival battered tech stocks and spooked the AI industry because the large language model (LLM) was reportedly made for a fraction of the cost of AI models like OpenAI's GPT-4, posing a threat to the American AI industry. OpenAI also claimed DeepSeek trained its AI off of OpenAI's data, which the internet found ironic since OpenAI is accused of doing the same thing to develop its own models. There are also DeepSeek's ethics and privacy concerns. Users have discovered instances of censorship when using R1, such as not answering questions about Tiananmen Square or evading truths about Uyghur oppression. Then there's DeepSeek's privacy policy, which says it collects extensive data from users and stores it on Chinese servers, meaning it's vulnerable to access by the Chinese government. With potential surveillance and data privacy issues in mind, the DeepSeek frenzy echoes the TikTok ban, which was put
Bill threatens to make using DeepSeek a crime for Americans