DeepSeek transmitted user data and queries to third parties without their consent and authorisation, South Korea’s Personal Data Protection Agency said on Thursday.
Nam Seok, director of the commission’s investigation bureau, said at a news conference that the app sent user queries as well as device and network information to Beijing-based cloud service Volcano Engine.
DeepSeek “acknowledged that it did not sufficiently consider Korea’s data protection laws” and “expressed its willingness to co-operate with the commission and voluntarily suspended new downloads,” Nam said.
DeepSeek has not yet provided an official response to requests for comment.
In February, South Korean authorities decided to block the use of Chinese artificial intelligence chatbot DeepSeek in their country.
The DeepSeek-R1 language model provides responses comparable to other state-of-the-art LLMs such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, but has been trained much cheaper ($6 million versus $100 million for GPT-4 in 2023) and requires ten times less computing power. The development of DeepSeek’s AI models took place against the backdrop of US sanctions against China over Nvidia chips, which were meant to limit the country’s ability to develop advanced AI systems.
DeepSeek is a Chinese company developing open source large language models (LLMs). Based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, it is wholly owned and funded by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer. The company was founded and is led by its CEO Liang Wenfeng in 2023.
