https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/tip/Does-using-DeepSeek-create-security-risks
Two years after ChatGPT's launch, China introduced a major rival to OpenAI's technology: DeepSeek.
The DeepSeek chatbot quickly gained traction in early 2025, surpassing ChatGPT as the most downloaded freeware app on Apple's iOS App Store in the U.S. market shortly after its Jan. 10 release. A week later, it reached the same milestone on Android's Google Play Store.
However, DeepSeek's rapid rise in popularity has sparked serious privacy and security concerns, particularly for business users who might input sensitive data into the chatbot. It's essential to understand these risks before using this new generative AI tool.
DeepSeek, developed by a Chinese AI startup of the same name, is a recent entrant to the crowded generative AI chatbot market. But its open source nature and the ability to access it entirely for free set it apart from competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude. To get started with DeepSeek's web application, users need only an email address or phone number to register for a free account.
What makes DeepSeek truly noteworthy, however, isn't its affordability, but its efficiency. Whereas other leading chatbots were trained using supercomputers with as many as 16,000 GPUs, DeepSeek achieved comparable results with only around 2,000 GPUs, The New York Times reported -- a huge and highly cost-effective reduction in resource requirements.
Functionally, DeepSeek shares similarities with ChatGPT; it's an AI-based chatbot that can answer questions and solve logical or coding problems. DeepSeek offers two main models: DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning model similar to OpenAI's o1 or o3, and DeepSeek-V3, a general conversational model similar to OpenAI's GPT-4o or GPT-4. However, DeepSeek distinguishes itself through its performance in technical and mathematical domains, whereas ChatGPT delivers natural, context-aware responses across a wider range of topics.
Users can host models locally via GitHub or access them through DeepSeek's web and mobile applications. When using the web or mobile app, users interact with models running on servers managed by DeepSeek. This means that DeepSeek's data-sharing policies apply, as do any centralized security measures the company has implemented.
In contrast, developers who locally host or fine-tune DeepSeek models deploy them directly onto their own infrastructure. As a result, their data isn't shared with DeepSeek, but responsibility for application security and data privacy disclosures is transferred to the downstream developer.
As a China-based organization, DeepSeek operates under strict censorship and data regulations. This raises concerns about user data being potentially shared with the Chinese government. In addition, DeepSeek's heavily censored and monitored environment poses privacy risks, especially for users outside China who might not fully understand the implications of using an AI tool closely tied to government oversight.
According to DeepSeek's privacy policy, the company collects the following user data when users access the model via the web app UI:
Critically, this information is stored on servers located in the People's Republic of China and can be shared with government entities.
DeepSeek is open source, which provides numerous advantages. For example, developers and startups can locally host and fine-tune prebuilt DeepSeek models inexpensively instead of training their own from scratch -- a process that can otherwise cost millions of dollars.
However, this open source approach also introduces serious risks concerning content generation:
Large language models from Western companies typically disallow generating malicious or dangerous content. Although users sometimes induce models like ChatGPT and Claude to produce harmful outputs, known as jailbreaking, doing so is often quite difficult due to the extensive guardrails these companies have developed. Moreover, proprietary models' safety mechanisms are more likely to be opaque to users, since their code is not exposed.
DeepSeek, on the other hand, seems comparatively more vulnerable to jailbreaking, even before fine-tuning. This could lead to scenarios where modified DeepSeek variants generate dangerous content, such as ransomware code or tools to automate cyberattack operations, including command-and-control mechanisms and evasion techniques.
DeepSeek's centralized data storage poses privacy and security risks for international users. Unlike many Western-developed AI tools, which typically use a decentralized structure that distributes data across global networks of servers, DeepSeek hosts all its servers in mainland China.
This data storage location means that interactions with DeepSeek's web application fall under Chinese legal jurisdiction. Consequently, when users from the U.S. or Europe engage with DeepSeek, their data becomes subject to Chinese laws and regulations, potentially exposing sensitive personal or corporate information entered into DeepSeek to oversight by Chinese authorities. Note that data storage concerns don't apply to users who run DeepSeek models locally on their own servers and hardware.
DeepSeek's data storage practices have already raised serious concerns among Western countries. For instance, Italy banned access to the DeepSeek application after the company failed to address concerns raised by the Italian data protection authority about its privacy policy. Similarly, in the U.S., a bipartisan Senate bill aims to prohibit the use of DeepSeek on federal government devices and networks.
According to research by Lasso Security, the current implementation of DeepSeek fails to adequately protect against AI hallucinations -- instances where an LLM fabricates false or misleading information while presenting it as factual. These errors often occur when models encounter ambiguous queries, attempt to respond to prompts without sufficient training data or are pushed to produce answers on topics beyond their knowledge boundaries.
The consequences of hallucinations can be serious, including the following:
Security researchers at Wiz identified critical vulnerabilities in DeepSeek's database infrastructure enabling unauthorized access and manipulation. These flaws reportedly exposed sensitive data contained within millions of log entries, including conversation histories, cryptographic keys, back-end infrastructure details and other privileged information.
And that wasn't the only discovery of an exposed DeepSeek database. A separate audit by cybersecurity firm NowSecure of DeepSeek's iOS app also uncovered serious security and privacy vulnerabilities:
DeepSeek's security posture dramatically differs from some of its major rivals, including Gemini and ChatGPT, particularly in data privacy and regulatory oversight.
The following are a few critical points of comparison:
Nihad A. Hassan is an independent cybersecurity consultant, expert in digital forensics and cyber open source intelligence, blogger, and book author. Hassan has been actively researching various areas of information security for more than 15 years and has developed numerous cybersecurity education courses and technical guides.
21 Mar 2025