China races to govern the country with DeepSeek — but at what risk?

HONG KONG/PALO ALTO, California — Since startup DeepSeek became the pride of China by singlehandedly crashing Nvidia’s stock price with its low-cost approach to artificial intelligence, local governments have been racing to use the model for everything from drafting documents and analyzing data to answering public queries and drawing up policies.

At a time when Italy, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, and the U.S. have all banned or are moving to ban the use of DeepSeek on government devices, China’s enthusiastic embrace of the technology is raising concerns over data security, potential waste of resources and the consequences of AI “hallucinations” on policymaking.