AsianFin — South Korea’s defense and trade ministries announced on Thursday that they had restricted access to DeepSeek on work computers, following a request from the country’s data watchdog for the Chinese AI start-up to clarify its user data management practices.
DeepSeek recently launched its R1 chatbot, claiming it rivals top U.S. AI models with significantly lower investment. However, South Korea, along with France and Italy, has raised concerns about the company’s data handling and formally requested further information.
Seoul’s defense ministry confirmed it had blocked DeepSeek on military computers connected to the internet, while the trade ministry stated that access had been temporarily restricted across all agency PCs.
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