South Korea is not the only country being cautious with DeepSeek given its Chinese origins. Australia has prohibited the use of DeepSeek on government devices out of security concerns. The Garante, Italy’s data protection authority, has instructed DeepSeek to block its chatbot in the country, while Taiwan has banned government departments from using DeepSeek AI.
Hangzhou city-based DeepSeek was founded by Liang Feng in 2023, and it released DeepSeek R1, a free, open-source reasoning AI model that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.