The Pentagon urgently started blocking the DeepSeek AI assistant when it turned out that the department's employees were connecting their work computers to Chinese servers, TechCrunch reports.
DeepSeek's terms of use explicitly state that the service stores user data on Chinese servers and subordinates it to Chinese law, which requires cooperation with the country's intelligence.
However, this did not stop employees of the US Department of Defense from succumbing to the DeepSeek hype this week and connecting their work computers to Chinese servers, using the service for at least two days.
The Pentagon has already begun blocking access to DeepSeek in part of its network, although some employees can still use the service.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government is trying to assess the national security threats posed by the popularity of a Chinese chatbot that topped the rankings in the U.S. App Store.
By the way, the US Navy has recently banned its employees from accessing DeepSeek due to security and ethical considerations, CNBC reports. It also became known that cyber specialists at Wiz Research discovered a leak of confidential information from the database of a Chinese AI assistant.
You can learn more about DeepSeek in our separate article.