The proposal comes after the Chinese software company in December published an AI model that performed at a competitive level with models developed by American firms like OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, and others.
DeepSeek purported to develop the model at a fraction of the cost of its American counterparts. A January research paper about DeepSeek's capabilities raised alarm bells and prompted debates among policymakers and leading Silicon Valley financiers and technologists.
The Associated Press previously reported DeepSeek has computer code that could send some user login information to a Chinese state-owned telecommunications company that has been barred from operating in the United States, according to the security research firm Feroot.