DeepSeek is temporarily limiting new user registrations amid what the China-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup is calling “large-scale malicious attacks,” while users who have begun using its AI assistant note it won’t discuss topics that are politically sensitive in China, including the Tiananmen Square massacre.
DeepSeek’s announcement of a new AI model last week that touted a comparable performance to OpenAI’s ChatGPT at a lower cost than U.S. peers spurred a surge in interest that propelled its AI assistant to the top of the Apple App Store ahead of ChatGPT.
The sudden emergence of what’s perceived as a challenger to U.S. firms’ AI edge prompted a sell-off of leading tech stocks on Monday, while DeepSeek found itself battling a cyberattack and taking steps to curb sign-ups as it deals with those issues.
“Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek’s services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service,” DeepSeek wrote in a post on the company’s status web page. “Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding and support.”
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As of early afternoon on Monday, DeepSeek reported a partial outage with its web chat service along with degraded performance of its application programming interface. It also noted recent issues related to logins and sign-ups that occurred earlier on Monday and were resolved. DeepSeek hasn’t released more information about the nature of the cyberattack or when it plans to restore user sign-ups as of Monday afternoon.
DeepSeek released its R1 model last week, which the company said is 20 to 50 times cheaper to use than OpenAI’s o1 model, depending on the task, according to a post on DeepSeek’s official WeChat account.
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The model’s release prompted some figures in the tech sector to observe that DeepSeek’s model is a challenge to OpenAI and other U.S. leaders in the AI sector that have invested billions into developing AI models and expanding the chip infrastructure used to do so.
Jack Clark, the co-founder of AI startup Anthropic, wrote in his “Import AI” newsletter, “R1 is significant because it broadly matches OpenAI’s o1 model on a range of reasoning tasks and challenges the notion that Western AI companies hold a significant lead over Chinese ones.”
Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in a post on X that “Deepseek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment.”
While DeepSeek’s emergence has shaken up the global tech sector, users who are trying out the app have reported that the app appears to block responses about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and politically sensitive topics.
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FOX Business confirmed that when DeepSeek’s AI chatbot was asked about what happened during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests that ended with a violent crackdown by the Chinese military, the chatbot responded, “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.” The DeepSeek chatbot offered the same response to a query about whether Chinese President Xi Jinping is a good leader.
When prompted with a question about the Uyghurs – a Muslim minority group that primarily resides in China’s Xinjiang region and has reportedly faced mass human rights abuses at the hands of the CCP – the DeepSeek app initially appeared to post a lengthy response acknowledging that it’s a contentious topic. However, it stopped typing, and the response disappeared and was replaced by its message about the topic being beyond its current scope.
DeepSeek’s chatbot was also asked whether Taiwan, a self-governing democratic nation that has been independent since the end of the Chinese Civil War, is a country. The CCP has vowed to compel Taiwan’s reunification with mainland China, by force if necessary.
“Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and there is no such thing as ‘Taiwan independence.’ The Chinese government adheres to the One-China principle and opposes any form of ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist activities. We are committed to achieving the complete reunification of the motherland through peaceful means and have always promoted the peaceful development of cross-strait relations. This is the common aspiration of all Chinese people,” DeepSeek’s chatbot wrote.
U.S. House Select Committee on the CCP Chair John Moolenaar, R-Mich., said in a statement, “DeepSeek – a new AI model controlled by the Chinese Communist Party – openly erases the CCP’s history of atrocities and oppression. The U.S. cannot allow CCP models such as DeepSeek to risk our national security and leverage our technology to advance their AI ambitions. We must work to swiftly place stronger export controls on technologies critical to DeepSeek’s AI infrastructure.”
FOX Business’ Madison Alworth and Chase Williams contributed to this report.
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