China slams politicization of tech as nations restrict DeepSeek

China has never – and will never – encourage businesses or individuals to collect or store users' data through illegal means, said the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs during a regular press briefing on Thursday.

Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun made the remarks in response to reports that several countries had restricted access to DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) service that recently topped the U.S. iPhone app store charts. The app's cutting-edge performance and low training costs reportedly contributed to a plunge in U.S. tech stocks.

The Chinese government places significant emphasis on protecting data privacy and security, operating strictly within legal frameworks, Guo told reporters. He also criticized the overextension of the concept of national security and the politicization of issues related to trade, economics and technology. At the same time, he reaffirmed China's commitment to safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of its companies on the global stage.

DeepSeek brings about real-world benefits

DeepSeek has adopted an open approach to developing large AI models. Its latest products, including the V3 language model, R1 reasoning model and Janus Pro vision model, are all freely available for download. Moreover, the company has published research papers detailing how these models were trained, enabling other developers to replicate the methods using their own datasets.

When downloaded and run locally, DeepSeek's models do not require an internet connection and cannot transmit users' private data to third parties – a feature unavailable in closed models developed by companies like OpenAI and Google. Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and co-founder of Netscape, previously described DeepSeek-R1 as "a profound gift to the world."

DeepSeek also offers its online chat service free of charge, providing users worldwide with tools to understand and create internet memes, solve problems using logic and generate innovative ideas.

Competitors embrace more open strategies

The success of DeepSeek has prompted other AI developers to explore more open approaches.

Days after the DeepSeek app gained widespread attention, OpenAI, a U.S.-based competitor, announced that the search functions for its ChatGPT service, introduced in October, would now be available for free without requiring users to sign up.

Alibaba, a leading Chinese internet company behind the Qwen series of open models, also unveiled its latest Qwen2.5-Max model, which was trained using methods similar to those employed for DeepSeek-V3. Additionally, Alibaba launched a web service allowing users to experience its models at no cost.