OpenAI calls on US government to ban DeepSeek, calling it state-subsidized
and state-controlled

Date:
Fri, 14 Mar 2025 11:39:59 +0000

Description:
OpenAI calls on US government to ban the use of DeepSeek in critical areas.

FULL STORY ======================================================================
- OpenAI has proposed banning DeepSeek in critical areas
- Calls DeepSeek "state-subsidized" and "state-controlled"
- OpenAI would like to see the removal of "overly burdensome state laws"

OpenAI has sent a proposal to the Office of Science and Technology Policy
that calls on the US government to ban the use of DeepSeek in governments, military, and intelligence services. Mentioning the Chinese AI by name, the proposal calls DeepSeek state-subsidized and state-controlled.

The letter, available on its website and signed by Chris Lehane, the Vice President of, Global Affairs at OpenAI, also proposes banning the use of PRC-produced equipment (e.g., Huawei Ascend chips) and models that violate
user privacy and create security risks such as the risk of IP theft among
what it called Tier 1 countries.

The letter says As Americas world-leading AI sector approaches artificial general intelligence (AGI), with a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) determined
to overtake us by 2030, the Trump Administrations new AI Action Plan can
ensure that American-led AI built on democratic principles continues to
prevail over CCP-built autocratic, authoritarian AI.

Identity crisis

DeepSeek recently caused a shockwave in the AI industry by providing similar results to the ChatGPT o1 reasoning model with its DeepSeek-R1 model, but at
a much lower price for developers and free for web browser use. Stock prices for companies heavily invested in AI saw an immediate drop , although the market has since returned to previous levels.

Many have questioned whether DeekSeek's rapid progress was truly down to an innovative new training methodology or whether it had distilled some training data from OpenAI against its terms and conditions. In fact, as we noticed on TechRadar, DeepSeek would sometimes mistake itself for ChatGPT when asked who it was.

The race for AGI

The letter from OpenAI states:

As with Huawei, there is significant risk in building on top of DeepSeek
models in critical infrastructure and other high-risk use cases given the potential that DeepSeek could be compelled by the CCP to manipulate its
models to cause harm.

There is no direct evidence to suggest that DeepSeek, which is owned and controlled by the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, is controlled by the Chinese government, however it's been noted that you cannot get the DeepSeek-R1
chatbot to answer questions about political topics sensitive to the PRC like the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.

OpenAI clearly sees humanity as being on the doorstep to artificial general intelligence (AGI) , which describes systems that possess human-like general intelligence. AGI is something that OpenAI has been working towards since its creation as a company, and the proposal also attacks the overly burdensome state laws that are holding it back.

As our CEO Sam Altman has written, we are at the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity: the Intelligence Age. But we must ensure that people have freedom of intelligence, by which we mean the freedom to access and benefit from AGI, protected from both autocratic powers that would take peoples freedoms away, and layers of laws and bureaucracy that would prevent our realizing them.

======================================================================
Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/openai-calls-on-us -government-to-ban-deepseek-calling-it-state-subsidized-and-state-controlled

$$
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
* Origin: capitolcityonline.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/HTTP (1:2320/105)