DeepSeek’s successful launch of a low-cost chatbot has sent shockwaves through the American IT community, sparking growing calls to ban Chinese AI tools in the United States. New York and Virginia said this week that they had decided to ban the use of DeepSeek on government devices. Texas had announced the same move on January 31.
“China’s DeepSeek AI poses a threat to the security and safety of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia,” said Glenn Youngkin, governor of Virginia. “We must continue to take steps to safeguard our operations and information from the Chinese Communist Party.” The Virginia government required state employees who downloaded the DeepSeek app to remove it from government devices by Wednesday.
Some news media outlets have raised the possibility that DeepSeek will face a complete US ban – forbidding all people in the US from accessing it – similar to what TikTok experienced on January 19.
President Donald Trump, however, has indicated he sees DeepSeek’s emergence as more of an asset than a national security threat to the US.
“Over the last couple of days, I’ve been reading about China and some of the companies in China, one in particular coming up with a faster method of AI and a much less expensive method, and that’s good because you don’t have to spend as much money,” he said on January 28. “I view that as a positive, as an asset.”
“Hopefully, 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 because we have the greatest scientists in the world,” he added.
“It’s a technology that’s happening. I think we’re going to benefit. If it’s correct, what’s going on now is that the AI we’re talking about will be a lot less expensive than people originally thought. That’s a good thing. I view that as a very good development, not a bad development,” Trump told a reporter on February 8.
Last October, Trump said he did not want to spend too much time figuring out how to ban TikTok in 2020, preferring that the US Congress decide.
“I said to Congress: It’s your decision. I’m not going to pull any strings,” Trump explained. “They decided not to make it. I did not care if they made it or not because, to me, it was a flip of a coin. You have some real First Amendment problems.”
“Frankly, I think everything’s a threat,” he said. “There’s nothing that’s not a threat, but sometimes you have to fight through these threats.” He added that Google had treated him badly, but he would not seek to destroy it or break it up.
US lawmakers’ bills
On February 6, two US Representatives, Democrat Josh Gottheimer and Republican Darin LaHood, introduced the bipartisan “No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act,” which would prohibit federal employees from using DeepSeek on government-issued devices.
“The Chinese Communist Party has made it abundantly clear that it will exploit any tool at its disposal to undermine our national security, spew harmful disinformation and collect data on Americans,” said Gottheimer. “Now, we have deeply disturbing evidence that they are using DeepSeek to steal the sensitive data of US citizens.”
Last month, Wiz Research said it had identified a DeepSeek database containing chat history, secret keys, backend details and other sensitive information on the Internet.
On January 29, Josh Hawley, a Republican Senator, introduced a bill titled “Decoupling America’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act of 2025,” calling for prohibitions on the import and export of AI or generative AI technology or intellectual property. He said the maximum penalty should be a $1 million fine or a 20-year jail term.
However, some media outlets misinterpreted the bill, saying that Hawley wants whoever downloaded DeepSeek to go to jail for 20 years.
Some Chinese commentators said Chinese students and workers should be aware of the potential legal risks when using DeepSeek in the US.
‘Knowledge distillation’
It is no secret that DeepSeek used the “knowledge distillation” method to train its AI model.
In this process, DeepSeek can be understood as a student who keeps asking questions to a knowledgeable teacher, for example ChatGPT, and uses the answers to fine-tune its logic. At some point, DeepSeek will be as smart as ChatGPT. This process requires much less computing power than what OpenAI has used to train ChatGPT.
The concept of using “knowledge distillation” was first suggested by Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist known as the “Godfather of AI,” in a 2015 academic paper, “Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network,”
In an analogy, he said AI training is like a caterpillar (an original AI model) consuming a large amount of leaves (data) before turning into a pupa. Still, it must become a butterfly (a distilled version) to fly away and mate.
Some analysts said ChatGPT 4o is already a distilled version of its original model ChatGPT-4 Turbo. They said the rise of DeepSeek can promote competition and force OpenAI to improve and provide better services to users.
Antitrust debates
Lina Khan, former chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, an antitrust body, says in an article published by the New York Times on February 4 that the US should continue to promote a fair and competitive environment for the AI industry to grow.
“DeepSeek is the canary in the coal mine. It’s warning us that when there isn’t enough competition, our tech industry grows vulnerable to its Chinese rivals, threatening US geopolitical power in the 21st century,” Khan says.
“In the coming weeks and months, US tech giants may renew their calls for the government to grant them special protections that close off markets and lock in their dominance,” she says. “Enforcers and policymakers should be wary.”
“The best way for the US to stay ahead globally is by promoting competition at home,” she adds.
However, IT blogger Noah Smith says Khan misunderstood the US AI industry, which is “incredibly competitive.” He says that while emphasizing competition, Khan only wants the US to avoid using export controls to curb China’s AI sector. He says Khan is suggesting that the US should not use export controls to curb China’s AI sector.
He says Khan contradicts herself by arguing both that
- weakened Chinese AI firms won’t provide enough competition to force US counterparts to improve; and that
- this will eventually lead to China’s victory in the global AI competition.
In a hearing on January 29, US Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick criticized DeepSeek for stealing US technology but he did not raise any national security concerns.
He said he would coordinate and empower the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS)’s export controls and tariffs to stop China from using American tools to compete with the US.
After all, some observers said, only export controls and tariffs – not hypothetical debates about national security risks – can make overseas US firms and foreign companies invest in the US.
Yong Jian is a contributor to the Asia Times. He is a Chinese journalist who specializes in Chinese technology, economy and politics.
Read: Too late, US Commerce nominee calls DeepSeek a technology ‘thief’
