Even though top-ranking former intelligence personnel from Australia are reluctant to immediately sound the alarm over DeepSeek, their international counterparts are beginning to raise concerns over the Chinese AI chatbot service.
South Korea’s spy agency has accused DeepSeek of “excessively” collecting personal data and using all input data to train itself, reported Reuters.
The National Intelligence Service (NIS) sent an official notice to government agencies last week urging them to take security precautions over the app.
“Unlike other generative AI services, it has been confirmed that chat records are transferable as it includes a function to collect keyboard input patterns that can identify individuals and communicate with Chinese companies’ servers such as volceapplog.com,” the NIS said in a statement issued on Sunday.
Ed Husic, Australia’s science minister, recently raised similar privacy concerns about DeepSeek. He told ABC News that there remained a lot of unanswered questions, including over “data and privacy management.”
The NIS noted that DeepSeek gave advertisers unlimited access to user data and stores South Korean users’ data on Chinese servers.
Separate media reports have also indicated that DeepSeek honed its skills at Microsoft’s controversial AI labs in China.
At least four current DeepSeek employees, including a key department chief, previously worked at Microsoft Research Asia, according to public profiles on the coding site GitHub and LinkedIn viewed by The New York Post.
Microsoft Research Asia consists of two labs in China – one in Beijing and one in Shanghai. DeepSeek’s ex-Microsoft employees includes the head of its AI “alignment team” as well as a former research intern at Microsoft Research Asia’s “natural language computing group”.
Microsoft confirmed its ties to those researchers, but sought to downplay the extent to which Microsoft’s training was used to develop.
“Anyone who thinks that a handful of former Microsoft interns were the secret of DeepSeek’s recent success doesn’t understand what DeepSeek has accomplished,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. Microsoft had previously asked hundreds of China-based employees in AI and cloud-computing roles to consider transferring to other countries, including Australia.
Still, leading voices from the Australian intelligence community include 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.
“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,” said Gilding.
DeepSeek was reportedly developed with a budget of around A$9.6 million, a fraction of the cost of its rivals. It led to a massive selloff of some of the world’s biggest tech stocks when it was released towards the end of January.
In Australia, DeepSeek is ranked first on the ‘Top Free iPhone Apps’ chart in the ‘Productivity’ category.
