Centre Planning An Advisory Soon Against DeepSeek: Report

The government is reportedly planning to soon issue an advisory, warning users on potential data privacy and cyber espionage risks pertaining to the use of Chinese AI tool DeepSeek.

The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) is enquiring about the implications of using the GenAI tool on Indian devices, ET reported, citing sources close to the matter.

The authority is keeping a tab on user’s behaviour based on the interaction with chatbot, data like battery usage and other app interactions.

This comes days after the finance ministry issued a directive prohibiting its officers from using AI tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek for official reasons to maintain data privacy and security.

Last month, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that India will soon host DeepSeek on local servers to address the privacy concerns regarding the cross-border data transfer.

Founded in 2023, DeepSeek AI is a Chinese company which has taken the world by storm with its cost-effective AI models. Last month, DeepSeek launched its free AI assistant DeepSeek-V3, claiming that it uses less data and costs only a fraction of services offered by incumbents. 

A few days back, it also launched its AI model called Janus-Pro-7B for AI-led image generation, which, it claims, outperforms OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion.

DeepSeek has also attained the position of the most downloaded mobile app across 140 markets, with India accounting for more than 15% of the downloads.

Along with India, countries like  Australia and Italy have also put restrictions on the usage of DeepSeek due to  privacy and security vulnerabilities. Additionally, Taiwan has also prohibited government agencies from using DeepSeek’s AI model, flagging national information security risks.