Bill threatens to make using DeepSeek a crime for Americans

A proposed new law would make it illegal for Americans to download the popular Chinese AI app DeepSeek.

On Monday, Sen. Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, introduced legislation that would “prohibit the import from or export to China of artificial intelligence technology.”

While the announcement mentions DeepSeek, the bill called the Decoupling America’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act doesn’t explicitly mention the Chinese AI company. Instead it speaks more broadly about protecting U.S. intellectual property and preventing a foreign adversary from using technology that undermines national security.

“America cannot afford to empower our greatest adversary at the expense of our own strength. Ensuring American economic superiority means cutting China off from American ingenuity and halting the subsidization of CCP innovation,” said Hawley in the announcement, before referencing the “international concern” triggered by the launch of DeepSeek’s R1 model.

In a matter of days, R1’s arrival battered tech stocks and spooked the AI industry because the large language model (LLM) was reportedly made for a fraction of the cost of AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4, posing a threat to the American AI industry. OpenAI also claimed DeepSeek trained its AI off of OpenAI’s data, which the internet found ironic since OpenAI is accused of doing the same thing to develop its own models.

There are also DeepSeek’s ethics and privacy concerns. Users have discovered instances of censorship when using R1, such as not answering questions about Tiananmen Square or evading truths about Uyghur oppression. Then there’s DeepSeek’s privacy policy, which says it collects extensive data from users and stores it on Chinese servers, meaning it’s vulnerable to access by the Chinese government.

With potential surveillance and data privacy issues in mind, the DeepSeek frenzy echoes the TikTok ban, which was put into effect for similar reasons. However, unlike the TikTok ban, Hawley’s legislation seeks to penalize people for downloading DeepSeek, by making it a criminal act. If passed, the bill would enforce a $1 million fine, jail time for up to 20 years, or both, based on the Export Control Reform Act of 2018.

In addition to the ban of imports and exports of Chinese AI technology, Hawley’s bill also proposes the prohibition of American companies “from conducting AI research in China or in cooperation with Chinese companies,” and banning U.S. companies from investing in Chinese AI companies.

The language of the legislation is broad, which could be an effort to eliminate any loopholes that led to the rise of DeepSeek in the first place. Part of the reason why DeepSeek was developed so cost-efficiently was because of the U.S. restricted access to Nvidia GPUs imposed on China, forcing the company to work with chips that were possibly smuggled, less powerful, or purchased before the sanctions.

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However, some users on X commented on Hawley’s post arguing that a reactionary bill hindering open source AI development could ultimately stifle U.S. innovation or push Chinese companies to find workarounds and innovate new technologies.