There are mixed messages coming out from leading figures in Australia as to whether we should be concerned about the security risks that DeepSeek, the Chinese AI chatbot, poses to users.
Ed Husic, Australia’s science minister, has raised privacy concerns about DeepSeek. He told ABC News this week that there remained a lot of unanswered questions, including over “data and privacy management.”
“I would be very careful about that, these type of issues need to be weighed up carefully,” he said.
“There are a lot of questions that will need to be answered in time on quality, consumer preferences, data and privacy management.”
But former Australian Signals Directorate deputy director-general for intelligence and network operations Simeon Gilding said that for now, Chinese-made electric cars pose a greater security concern than the chatbot app and that it was too early to begin considering if DeepSeek should be banned.
That assessment could change if Chinese security services began trying to integrate the technology into critical infrastructure and services.
“I’m not worried about a little app. I’m more worried about what it means for the cost and competitiveness of Chinese AI embedded in critical technology,” he told The Australian Financial Review.
“I think that’s a much bigger concern than an app that is a great parlour trick at this stage. If DeepSeek AI can make Chinese products and services cheaper and more awesome, they have the opportunity to become more pervasive in our digital ecosystems, and therefore more dangerous.”
Gilding is only too aware of the impact of foreign technology in critical networks. Back in 2017, Gilding’s team warned the Australian government that Chinese state hackers could through a network controller such as Huawei insert complex code during a system update to gain control of a 5G network.
For now though, Gilding is more worried about electric cars and the security threats they pose, rather than DeepSeek.
“Could DeepSeek cross some kind of firewall into your phone and control it? I doubt it, although I don’t know,” he said. “I would be more worried about Chinese electric vehicles. Like the F-35 [fighter jet], they are data sinks. Electric vehicles suck up data and send it back to China where it may or may not be accessed by the Communist Party.
“[DeepSeek] could potentially become a vector for disruption, if directed by Chinese security services. That would make it more like 5G scale security challenge
“So it’s worth considering whether we should allow our companies to embed this technology into their products and services, if they provide critical products and services.”
DeepSeek was reportedly made at a fraction of the cost of its rivals, and launched last week. It has become one of the most downloaded free apps in the US and UK.
In Australia, it ranked first on the ‘Top Free iPhone Apps’ chart in the ‘Productivity’ category, according to market analysts Sensor Tower.
“If DeepSeek became a default choice for Australian, Western as well as Chinese companies seeking to improve their products and services, that could be a Sputnik moment. We are not there yet,” said Gilding.
“These things are all about confidence and what people think the future will be. And up until three days ago, people thought the future was us, was American-led tech.”
US President Donald Trump has already described DeepSeek and its soaring popularity as “a wake-up call” for the US tech industry.
DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng in Hangzhou, a city in southeastern China. It is powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, which its researchers claim was trained for around A$9.6 million, far less than the billions spent by rival tech companies.
Following its launch last week, it led to a historic rout of those tech companies, notably Nvidia, Microsoft and Google, which collectively saw hundreds of billions swiped of their market value shortly after the app launched.
