- The Department of Australian domestic affairs has prohibited the use of Deepseek
- India’s financial department has also warned against its use
- Concerns have arisen over privacy and security of AI models
The new Deepseek AI Chatbot has made headlines and even became short the world’s most popular chatbot within 10 days of launch – overtaken existing models such as Chatgpt and Gemini.
However, new research has claimed that Deepseek Chatbot is ‘incredibly vulnerable’ to attacks, triggering national security concerns that have caused Australia’s Institute of Domestic Affairs to ban the use of the model of federal government units.
The policy issued on February 4, 2025, determines the use of Deepseek products and web services ‘constitute an unacceptable level of security risk to the Australian government’ and warns that departments should control the risk of the ‘comprehensive collection of data’ And the exposure of the data for ‘out of court directions from a foreign government that conflicts with Australian law’.
After the trend
Australia is not alone in this. India’s Finance Ministry has also asked its employees to avoid using AI tools, such as Deepseek and Chatgpt for official purposes, and has cited the risk of confidential government documents and data.
Similarly, the US Navy banned the use of Deepseek in ‘any capacity’ due to ‘potential security and ethical concerns’, and Italy’s data protection authority said it ordered Deepseek to block its model in the country after the company could not tackle the regulator’s Privacy Political concerns, only providing information that the regulator found ‘completely inadequate’.
AI companies, like Chatgpt and Deepseek, collect large amounts of data from all corners of the Internet to train their chatbots and have run in trouble against the law of data protection legislation around the world.
In addition, some models have worrying privacy policies. For example, Openai has never asked people for consent to use their data and it is not possible for individuals to check what information is stored.
