DeepSeek cooperates with Chinese military and circumvents US export restrictions — Reuters

US officials have accused Chinese AI company DeepSeek of helping China's military and intelligence agencies. The company is also trying to gain access to NVIDIA chips banned from China through shell companies in Southeast Asia, according to the US State Department, Reuters reports, citing anonymous sources.

According to a Reuters source, DeepSeek:

• transfers user data to Chinese government agencies;
• mentioned in over 150 contracts with the PRC army;
• has access to a large number of powerful NVIDIA H100 chips;
• is trying to use data centers outside of China to work with chips remotely.

It is known that the Malaysian government is already investigating the possible use of H100 servers to train large DeepSeek language models. At the same time, NVIDIA stated that DeepSeek purchased only authorized H800 chips and the company is not on the US sanctions list, which allows it to use these technologies legally for now.

DeepSeek rose to prominence in January 2025 when it claimed that its V3 and R1 models were close to OpenAI and Meta in terms of quality. However, experts have questioned the veracity of these claims, in particular due to the low training costs claimed for the models.

DeepSeek was also mentioned in the context of transferring data from American users through infrastructure associated with China Mobile. The company declined to comment on these allegations.

The situation is unfolding against the backdrop of an aggravation of the technological confrontation between the United States and China, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence and semiconductors.