Deepseek artificial intelligence company provides user data to the Chinese government, a senior US official told Reuters, adding that Chinese technological startup has attempted to use southeast Asia showcase companies to gain access to high -tech semiconductors.

DEEPSEEK based in Hangtzu has shocked the technology world in January, arguing that its artificial intelligence models were comparable or better than the top models of the American industry.

“We understand that Deepseek has eagerly provided and will probably continue to provide support to China’s military and intelligence operations,” a senior State Department official told Reuters in an interview.

“This effort goes beyond access to Deepseek artificial intelligence models with open source,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The US government’s assessment on Deepseek activities and its links to the Chinese government has not been mentioned before and is coming in a large scale of US-China trade war.

Among the allegations, the official said Deepseek is sharing information and user statistics with the Beijing surveillance mechanism.

Chinese legislation requires companies operating in China to provide data to the government when requested. But the suspicion that Deepseek is already doing this is likely to raise concerns about privacy and other concerns about the tens of millions of daily users of the company worldwide. The US also maintains restrictions on companies that believe they are linked to China’s military-industrial complex.

American legislators have previously stated that Deepseek is transmitting US users’ data to China through “Backend Infrastructure” associated with China Mobile, a Chinese state telecommunications giant.

The company also refers to more than 150 times in supply files for China’s People’s Liberation Army and other entities linked to the Chinese defense industrial base, the official said, adding that Deepseek had provided technological services to PLA research institutions.

The official also said that the company used bypasses in US export controls to gain access to advanced US chips.

Deepseek has access to ‘large quantities’ of High-End Chip H100 by NVIDIA’s NVIDIA company, the official said. In 2022, these chips have been under US export restrictions due to Washington’s concerns that China could use them to promote its military capabilities.

“Deepseek has sought to use showcase companies in Southeast Asia to bypass export controls and Deepseek seeks to gain access to database centers in Southeast Asia to have remote access to US chips,” the official said.

The official refused to say whether Deepseek had successfully avoided export controls or to provide more details about the showcases.

When asked if the US would apply further export controls or penalties against Deepseek, the official said the ministry had “nothing to announce right now”.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese Ministry of Commerce did not respond to Reuters’ request for commentary.

“We do not support places that have violated US export controls or are in the US entities,” a Nvidia spokesman said in a ready statement, adding that “with current export controls, we are essentially outside the market for China’s data centers, which is only served by Huawei.”

Deepseek said two of its artificial intelligence models, which Silicon Valley executives and engineers of American technology companies have praised – Deepseek -V3 and Deepseek -R1 – are comparable to the most advanced Openai and Meta.O Meta models.

However, artificial intelligence experts expressed skepticism, arguing that the actual costs of training the models was probably much higher than the $ 5.58 million that Startup said they were spent on computing power.

Seeks access to American chips

Reuters has previously reported that US officials were investigating whether Deepseek had access to artificial intelligence chips.

Deepseek has H100 chips which it supplied after the US banned NVIDIA from selling these chips in China, three sources knowing the issue told Reuters, adding that the number was much lower than the 50,000 H100 claimed by the CEO of another Startup AI.

Reuters was unable to verify the number of Deepseek H100 chips.

“Our review shows that Deepseek has used legally acquired H800 products, not H100,” a NVIDIA spokesman said, answering a Reuters question about the supposed use of DEEPSEEK H100 chips.

In February, Singapore led to three men in a fraud in a case that domestic media linked Nvidia’s advanced chips from the city of Singapore to Deepseek.

China is also suspected of finding ways to use advanced American chips.

While the introduction of advanced Nvidia chips into China without permission violates US export rules, Chinese companies continue to access the same chips remotely in data centers in countries without restrictions.

The exceptions are when a Chinese company is in a commercial black list of the US or when the chip exporter knows that the Chinese company is using its chips to help develop weapons of mass destruction.

US officials have not yet placed Deepseek in any trading black list of US and have not claimed that Nvidia was aware of Deepseek’s work with the Chinese army.

The Malaysian Ministry of Commerce said last week that it was investigating whether an anonymous Chinese company in the country was using servers equipped with NVIDIA chips to educate large language models and considering whether any domestic law or regulation has been violated.