South Korea’s Data Protection Agency announced it will seek clarification from Chinese tech startup DeepSeek to understand its processing of users’ personal information. This comes after the company launched its powerful new AI chatbot R1, which has attracted attention to data privacy and sparked turmoil in the global tech market.
DeepSeek’s R1 Chatbot is touted as the main challenger to lead the development of AI systems in the United States, offering comparable capabilities at a very small cost. The launch brought a shock wave through the tech industry, with shares in major companies such as Nvidia falling 17% earlier this week. The rapid development of chatbots has reviewed the huge investments in AI technology by American companies in recent years.
A spokesperson for the South Korean Personal Information Protection Commission confirmed to AFP that they will formally provide information about AI data processing practices from DeepSeek. However, details of the request have not been disclosed.
The company’s R1 model has also attracted the attention of European regulators. Italy’s Data Protection Agency investigates DeepSeek’s AI, preventing Italian users from processing personal data. Authorities are eager to determine the origin of the data used to train chatbots and whether users have fully understood how data is processed, especially data scraped off the Internet.
Similarly, France’s CNIL Data Watchdog announced that it will also interact with DeepSeek to understand the potential risks associated with the data processing mechanism of AI systems.
DeepSeek uses the less-than-desired H800 chip (previously allowed to be sold to China under U.S. export control until 2023) claiming its model is built on smaller investments compared to its U.S. counterparts. Despite the use of less advanced technologies, AI’s impressive performance has attracted the attention of industry experts, especially because of its ability to compete with our AI advancements.
The uncertainty of DeepSeek AI has caused significant volatility in the Korean stock market. Shares of Samsung Electronics fell more than 2%, while SK Hynix’s stock fell nearly 12%, with analysts attributeing the losses to increasingly disastrous effects on the rise of DeepSeek on the global AI landscape.
