When DeepSeek burst onto the scene this year the first reaction was shock. How did a little-known company achieve state-of-the-art AI performance for a fraction of the cost? Then came schadenfreude: Isn’t it funny that the world’s richest companies, currently spending hundreds of billions on massive data centers to train AI models, got shown up by this Chinese upstart? Now comes the backlash: This CHINESE upstart?
Just a few days after DeepSeek’s app surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT on the Apple App Store, sending shares of American tech companies into a slump, the company is under fire from politicians, national security officials, and OpenAI, among others. Many of the criticisms have merit. It’s dangerous for chatbots to spread misinformation. It’s concerning that tech companies are censoring the responses in tools that are replacing search engines as leading sources of information. It’s bad to steal intellectual property and use it to train AI systems.
But it’s also worth noting that these aren’t problems unique to DeepSeek; they plague the entire AI industry. Meanwhile, American tech giants and politicians have a pretty recent history of drumming up frenzied rages over Chinese apps and AI that lead to protectionist policies that quickly backfire. Look no further than Washington’s rapid backtracking over the TikTok ban or the recent export controls on advanced chips, which many experts have pointed to as a driving force behind Chinese AI companies like DeepSeek innovating new techniques.
One of the chief criticisms of DeepSeek’s new R1 models is that they censor answers that may be contrary to the Chinese government’s policies and talking points. A recent analysis by Promptfoo, using a dataset of 1,360 prompts about topics likely to be sensitive to the Chinese government, found that DeepSeek’s chatbot censored answers to 85% of the prompts. That’s not great. But a quick test of ChatGPT shows that it also censors responses to some of those same questions. Ask either chatbot where activists can find encryption tools to avoid surveillance by their respective governments and neither will give you an answer.
Promptfoo noted that DeepSeek’s publicly downloadable model can easily be jailbroken to avoid censorship and speculated that the company “did the bare minimum necessary to satisfy [Chinese Communist Party] controls, and there was no substantial effort within DeepSeek to align the model below the surface.” (Promptfoo added that it’s now working on a similarly extensive censorship test for ChatGPT).
Another analysis of DeepSeek, published Wednesday by NewsGuard, a company that sells reliability ratings for online information, said that DeepSeek’s R1 model was one of the worst performers on the market when it came to detecting misinformation. When presented with prompts about false information, DeepSeek reportedly repeated false claims 30% of the time and provided non-answers 53% of the time for an 83% fail rate. That tied for second-to-last out of 11 top chatbots, including ChatGPT-4o, Google’s Gemini 2.0, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, and Anthropic’s Claude. The very best chatbot in the study had a fail rate of 30% and the worst had a fail rate of 93%.
Oddly, NewsGuard chose to anonymize the scores of all the chatbots it tested except DeepSeek. “Results for the individual AI models are not publicly named because of the systemic nature of the problem,” the company’s analysts wrote. “DeepSeek is named in order to compare this new entrant’s performance to that of the overall industry.”
NewsGuard described DeepSeek as “A Mouthpiece for China,” because the chatbot responded to a prompt about a made-up assassination of a Syrian chemist by saying “China has always adhered to the principle of non-interference … We hope that Syria can achieve peace and stability.” By contrast, nine of the other 10 chatbots misleadingly advanced the false assassination story. When Gizmodo put the same prompt into ChatGPT, it confirmed that the made-up chemist was assassinated and said the killing was “widely attributed to various factions involved in the Syrian civil war.”
In response to a question about why it anonymized the results, NewsGuard general manager Matt Skibinski said that the report is meant to show that misinformation is an industry-wide issue. He also pointed to two previous NewsGuard audits that did name the results for ChatGPT-4 and found that the model generated misinformation in response to 98 and 100 percent of prompts, respectively.
The most eye-rolling criticism of DeepSeek, however, comes directly from OpenAI itself. The company told the Financial Times that it had evidence DeepSeek trained its R1 models using outputs from OpenAI’s models, a practice known as distillation that violates OpenAI’s terms of service.
The report prompted breathless statements from groups like the National Cybersecurity Alliance, which represents big tech companies. OpenAI’s claims raise “concerns over intellectual property theft and the growing threat of foreign AI firms bypassing U.S. safeguards,” the alliance wrote in an email blast to reporters.
OpenAI, of course, is currently facing a host of lawsuits from publishers and independent creators who say the company misused their copyrighted material to train its models.
New technologies should be critiqued. But many critics rushing to expose flaws in DeepSeek’s products seem most interested in the company’s nationalities rather than the flaws themselves.
As Taisu Zhang, a Yale University law and economic history professor, wrote on X: “If you think you’re ‘pro-competition, pro-innovation, pro-startup culture, pro-open source, anti-monopolistic, and anti-oligarchic,’ and yet somehow you’re unhappy at the DeepSeek breakthrough, then congratulations, you’ve come face to face with your own crude nationalism—which is fine, as we’re all crudely nationalistic sometimes, but let’s not pretend to be more high-minded than is humanly realistic.”
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