- DeepSeek has long been on the US government’s radar.
- A former AI advisor for the Biden administration said the US has been watching DeepSeek since late 2023.
- He said the US should “tighten the screws and continue to constrain them.”
DeepSeek’s capabilities shocked the markets, but a former special advisor for artificial intelligence in the Biden administration says the Chinese AI firm was on the US government’s radar — and had been for over a year.
“We had been watching DeepSeek in the White House since November 2023 or thereabouts, when they put out their first coding system,” Ben Buchanan said during the latest episode of “The Ezra Klein Show,” which aired on Tuesday.
“There’s no doubt that DeepSeek engineers are extremely talented, and they got better and better at their systems throughout 2024,” Buchanan added.
Buchanan, now an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, served in the Biden administration from June 2021 to this January. He held roles in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Security Council before becoming President Joe Biden’s special advisor for AI in June 2023.
Buchanan told Klein that while DeepSeek’s accomplishments have been impressive, he didn’t think the “media hype around it was warranted.”
DeepSeek triggered a sell-off in AI-related stocks in January after the startup’s high-performing and cheap models sparked concerns that demand for AI hardware could fall.
However, Buchanan said that DeepSeek is “doing exactly the same kind of algorithmic efficiency work” as other AI companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic.
“They still are constrained by computing power,” Buchanan said of DeepSeek. “We should tighten the screws and continue to constrain them.”
“And this should be a reminder that chip controls are important, China is a worthy competitor here, and we shouldn’t take anything for granted,” Buchanan added. “But I don’t think this is the time to say the sky is falling or the fundamental scaling laws have broken.”
In January, President Donald Trump told GOP lawmakers at the party’s annual policy retreat that he saw DeepSeek’s cheaper models as “a positive, as an asset.”
“The release of DeepSeek, AI from a Chinese company, should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win,” Trump said.
Representatives for DeepSeek and the White House did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
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