The Italians have officially banned the popular Chinese AI tool DeepSeek in the country days after demanding information from its creators about collecting and processing personal user data. GPDP, the Italian data watchdog stated that the information provided by DeepSeek was “completely insufficient” leading to an immediate ban.
In an announcement made on X, the data protection entity claims that the companies behind DeepSeek have “declared that they do not operate in Italy and that European legislation does not apply to them.” The chatbot has since been banned immediately, and an investigation has been launched.
The GPDP had previously sent a notice to Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence, the entities behind the DeepSeek web and mobile apps, demanding answers about its data handling practices as well as the source of the training data used to train the DeepSeek AI model.
The GPDP did not mention exactly what it will be investigating, but given how it and other data protection entities worldwide have treated similar AI bots in the past, it’s very likely that DeepSeek’s data collection and processing practices might come under fire.
Despite being massively popular and even overtaking OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT, DeepSeek’s popularity has been rooted in controversy. The service has already suffered its first major data breach within a month of being launched to the public, and researchers have already started poking holes in its security measures.
The model is reportedly susceptible to jailbreak techniques like EvilBOT and Bad Likert Judge. Additionally, being made by a Chinese company that stores user data within China’s borders has further raised concerns about how collected user data is processed.
DeepSeek still has a chance to unban itself in Italy. The GPDP issued a similar ban on ChatGPT in 2023 after discovering that OpenAI was illegally collecting user data and had no measures to check if minors were using its services, despite ChatGPT being made for users above 13 years of age. However, the chatbot resumed services shortly after complying with the regulator’s demands. If DeepSeek can find a middle ground, we could see the chatbot return to Italy soon.
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