China criticizes politicization of technology as states restrict DeepSeek

China has never and will never encourage businesses or individuals to collect or store user data by illegal means, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said at a regular press briefing on Thursday.

Spokesman for the Ministry Guo Jiakun said this in response to reports that several countries have restricted access to DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence service that recently topped the US iPhone app store rankings. The app's superior performance and low training costs have reportedly contributed to a plunge in US tech company stocks.

"The Chinese government places a strong emphasis on privacy and data security and operates strictly within the law," Guo told reporters. He also criticised the over-expansion of the concept of national security and the politicisation of issues related to trade, economy and technology. He also reaffirmed China's commitment to protecting the legitimate rights and interests of its companies on the global stage.

DeepSeek delivers real benefits

DeepSeek has adopted an open approach to developing large-scale AI models. Its latest products, including the V3 language model, the R1 reasoning model, and the Janus Pro vision model, are freely available for download. In addition, the company has published research papers detailing how these models were trained, allowing other developers to replicate these methods using their own datasets.

When downloaded and run locally, DeepSeek models do not require an internet connection and cannot pass users' private data to third parties - a feature not available in closed models developed by companies such as OpenAI and Google. Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and co-founder of Netscape, has previously called DeepSeek-R1 "a profound gift to the world."

DeepSeek also offers its online chat service for free, giving users around the world the tools to understand and create Internet memes, solve problems using logic, and generate innovative ideas.

Competitors adopt more open strategies

DeepSeek's success has prompted other AI developers to explore more open approaches.

A few days after DeepSeek gained widespread attention, US competitor OpenAI announced that the search features of its ChatGPT service, introduced in October, will now be available for free without users having to register.

Alibaba, the leading Chinese internet company behind the Qwen series of open models, also unveiled its latest model, Qwen2.5-Max, which was trained using similar methods to those used for DeepSeek-V3. In addition, Alibaba has launched a web service that allows users to try out its models for free.

CMG/ gnews - RoZ