A recent congressional investigation has concluded that the Chinese artificial intelligence platform DeepSeek poses a serious and growing threat to U.S. national security.
According to a new report from the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, DeepSeek secretly harvests American user data, censors information according to CCP directives, and was likely built using stolen U.S. technology—all while relying on semiconductor chips that should never have reached China in the first place.
“DeepSeek represents a profound threat to our nation’s security,” the report warns. “Although it presents itself as just another AI chatbot… closer inspection reveals that the app siphons data back to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), creates security vulnerabilities for its users, and relies on a model that covertly censors and manipulates information pursuant to Chinese law.”
To address this threat, the report recommends an expansion of export controls, stronger enforcement against Chinese AI platforms, and the creation of a federal whistleblower program to report violations. It also calls for heightened coordination among national security agencies to prevent China from achieving a “strategic surprise” in the AI race.
How DeepSeek Works—and Why It’s Dangerous
The committee’s investigation found that DeepSeek transmits extensive data – including chat history, device details, and even user typing behavior – through back-end infrastructure connected to China Mobile, a state-owned telecom firm designated by the U.S. Department of Defense as a Chinese military asset. China Mobile has been banned from operating in the U.S. since 2019 due to fears that “unauthorized access to customer… data could create irreparable damage to U.S. national security.”
Cybersecurity analysts also discovered that DeepSeek sends user information with “no meaningful security measures,” raising serious concerns that the system was deliberately designed to make Americans’ data easily accessible to Chinese authorities.
Moreover, the AI model itself is manipulated to serve Beijing’s strategic interests. DeepSeek censored politically sensitive topics, including democracy, Taiwan, and human rights, in 85 percent of test cases. It doesn’t merely avoid controversial topics; it actively rewrites history and reinforces CCP talking points. “Beijing is not just censoring the internet at home. It is embedding its Great Firewall into platforms Americans use every day,” the report notes.
Built on Stolen Technology
DeepSeek’s capabilities didn’t come from scratch. Congressional investigators found that DeepSeek likely used “model distillation” – a technique that copies reasoning capabilities from other AI models – to replicate U.S. systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. OpenAI confirmed to Congress that DeepSeek employees circumvented protections, used fraudulent accounts, and extracted model outputs in violation of OpenAI’s terms of service.
“Through our review, we found that DeepSeek employees circumvented guardrails in OpenAI’s models… to accelerate the development of advanced model reasoning capabilities at a lower cost,” OpenAI told the committee. This kind of intellectual property theft poses serious challenges for U.S. companies trying to maintain a competitive edge in a high-stakes field.
Smuggled Chips Fuel the Engine
Even more disturbing is how DeepSeek built and trained its model. According to the report, DeepSeek uses tens of thousands of high-powered chips made by Nvidia, including A100s, H800s, and H100s – many of which are subject to strict U.S. export controls. These chips are crucial to building large-scale AI models, and selling them to China without a license is prohibited.
Yet DeepSeek appears to have acquired many of these chips through illegal channels. Investigators discovered a smuggling network operating out of Singapore, where three individuals – one a Chinese national – were charged for illegally exporting Nvidia chips to China. The network was busted shortly after members of Congress raised alarms about chip smuggling via Singapore.
This incident underscores a broader problem: U.S. companies and intermediaries are still supplying adversaries with the technological tools needed to match and surpass American capabilities.
A Pattern of Strategic Deception
DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, maintains effective control of the company through a complex corporate structure with ties to High-Flyer Quant, a firm that invested $420 million into DeepSeek’s development. The company operates within a state-subsidized Chinese tech corridor built to realize “Xi Jinping Thought” – the ideological core of the CCP.
Liang’s connections to military-linked researchers and the state-run Zhejiang Lab highlight how closely Chinese tech innovation is tied to national security goals. The app’s integration with entities like Tencent, Baidu, and ByteDance – each with their own histories of surveillance, censorship, or military affiliation – makes DeepSeek more than just a technological threat. It is, in effect, a tool of geopolitical warfare.
Lessons from the Cold War
Experts interviewed for this piece suggest the U.S. needs to reestablish the kind of strict export control framework that helped contain Soviet technological ambitions during the Cold War. Hans-Günter Förstner, a retired professor of international law who enforced Cold War-era trade controls for West Germany, recalled how the U.S.-led Coordination Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) successfully denied Moscow access to critical technologies.
“The Americans… always emphasized that the priority was to deny access to all knowledge and products related to robotics and space technology,” Förstner said. “President Reagan was entirely correct.”
Dr. Xiàhóu Li Wei, a former senior CCP official who defected to the West, stressed that the current threat is even greater. “The CCP wanted the West to see China as a completely different entity from the Soviet Union,” he said. “It was a deception. The CCP kept winning until recently.”
Policy Recommendations: What Congress Must Do
To counter this growing threat, the report offers several urgent recommendations:
- Expand export controls to include new chip types like Nvidia’s H20 and improve enforcement mechanisms through whistleblower incentives and bilateral crackdowns on smuggling routes like Singapore.
- Require U.S. firms to track the end users of advanced chips and software.
- Mandate security and transparency standards for all AI systems trained on U.S.-origin technology.
- Prohibit the federal government from using Chinese AI platforms like DeepSeek.
The report concludes with a stark warning: “The potential for AI strategic surprise is most acute in the national security space. An AI weaponized and deployed by a U.S. adversary may prove to be a decisive advantage before a conflict starts”.
China’s AI ambitions are not just technological – they are ideological, strategic, and adversarial. The time to act is now.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
And, if the Trump team makes any effort to control any of this activity, the progressive judges will run interference on behalf of the CCP at every turn. Just like they do for everything else.
Lessons from the Cold War? America has not learned from the I or II World War, as for what Congress must do, when was the last time it did anything useful and if, how long did it take? China became what it became because we stood by and watched and aided becoming it instead of stopping it.
Is the technology “stolen” when your former POTUS was receiving bribes from China?
Too soon??
China’s espionage crimes are a lethal threat to the United States. So, yes, more stringent technology controls are needed, but also the U.S. government should outlaw Chinese nationals to enroll in American universites !!! My God, we ARE TRAINING THE ENEMY THAT WANTS TO SINK OUR DEAR COUNTRY !!!! Wake up, America !!!
Who remembers a couple of Clinton fundraisers [Chinese] who gave the CCP plans for some of US technology back around 2000? Turtle McConnell’s in-laws are Chinese and both Senator Feinstein and Eric [loser] Swalwell were connected to known Chinese spies!
AI is dangerous and I don’t have anything to do with it.
Does this come as a surprise? Biden took a 30 million dollar bribe from the CCP. He sold America down the drain for a few pieces of silver. And anything and everything Trump tries to stem like the spying by the Chinese here and in cyberspace, they will undermine. Terrorists attacks are increasing. No American citizen is safe in a Sanctuary city or state. For that matter not anywhere. Especially if you are not a progressive. Common sense is not easy to accept by these brain washed dems. Hate and killing of our leaders is number one on their agenda. Even if Trump would be killed they won’t stop with their dictatorial platform, their lies. They won’t stop till they have total power and America is destroyed as we know it to be for the past 250 years give or take off a few years when we had dictators in the White House.
Something must be to insure security of nation!
when you do business with china you give them your proprietary information and dont forget politcians and schools and government agencies maybe they didnot steal it
It is just amazing how impotent Congress and the “deep state” really are against our adversaries.China built a huge country and massive economic power based substantially on their theft of intellectual property from the US. The theft and spying has been going on for more than 30 years and our government and big corporations are apparently powerless to stem the tide. The government having an issue with “Deep Seak” built on base programing from Open AI is at its core laughable. By definition open source code is available to everyone and if anyone thinks China isn’t hip deep in that development process then they probably should not be working in the intelligence community. They caught Super Micro among others more or less openly selling NVDA chips to China, and what have they done about it? The idea of restricting trade on these chips, available on the open market, is laughable (someone will always sell things when there is huge profit to be mad).
Their ideas to correct the problems are every bit as naive as their concern about China’s use of the Open AI code as a base for their model. Piling requirements on our Companies to attempt to track end users of chips and software obviously addts to their workload and is clearly not in their speciality of developing and selling products. As for mandating security and transparency for AI systems, open source is about as transparent as you can get (but that makes it available to EVERYONE) and adding security to open source code would be quite a trick.
Isn’t just about every technology “developed” by China stolen from the US or other countries?
Can we Counter??
My dad was right – when I was young, in the 50’s he told me, never trust CHINA!!!!
Well F-ing duh. China’s entire economy is based on stolen technology. But can you say it is truly stolen when we give them the authority to manufacture the products we buy? Do you seriously think they are not going to reverse engineer this stuff? We are doing it to ourselves just as much as China is doing it to us.By “we” I mean our politicians, but then who elected them? Mirror please.
these are the ones stealing everyone blind around the world. only one politician, in the world, was awake to be able to say “F****IN’ NO!” to them! Prayers answered!
It appears to me that the U.S. government should ban access to Deepseek by anyone in the U.S., if that is possible. I have never used TikTok and have encouraged others to not use it due to the possibility that it was collecting data from U.S. users and funneling it to the CCP. The continued widespread use of TikTok in the U.S. shows that people will not heed warnings. If Deepseek remains available in the U.S., people will still use it.
China and the Democratic Party have waged war on the American people! As I stated before, the Democratic Party are not Americans they are Socialist, Marxist, Muslim/Hamas, Communist, etc! We must be aggressive to stop the destruction of America and what it stands for!
It is my hope that NVIDIA is part of the solution and not part of the problem.
All progressive judges at every level need to be arrested for treason NOW not someday, but NOW. They are all Chinese operatives and need taken out immediately if we have any hope of not being enslaved by the Chinese demoncrats!!!
Same old crap. Another significant nation builds something better than we can and immediately we scream “stolen technology”. Even Bozo the Trump in a fever dream is somehow convinced that Russia has hypersonic weaponry because they stole the tech from America, somehow not explaining why such tech amazingly had only a single copy of its makeup that equally amazingly has kept us from also developing hypersonic weaponry…..or merely ask the engineers and scientists that invented this reported American based tech to………redo what they had done. Trump loves hi mself but thinks we the people are STUPID.
This “China’s tech is evil and will eat your pets” line of crap sure does rhyme with the way black people were talked about in the past, or, though one dares not mention it anymore, the way Jewish people were talked about in the past. “Ni**ers steal evah thing that aint nailed down” or “the damned K*kes will do anything to get inside for control as long as it makes em a buck”.
Time to quit blaming our failure to make anything of substance on everyone other than ourselves. My goodness, look at our auto’s, our electronics. Hahaha……look at what just fell off another Boeing aircraft.