AI firm DeepSeek is aiding China's military and intelligence operations, a senior U.S. official told Reuters, adding that the Chinese tech startup sought to use Southeast Asian shell companies to access high-end semiconductors that cannot be shipped to China under U.S. rules.
The U.S. conclusions reflect a growing conviction in Washington that the capabilities behind the rapid rise of one of China's flagship AI enterprises may have been exaggerated and relied heavily on U.S. technology.
Hangzhou-based DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the technology world in January, saying its artificial intelligence reasoning models were on par with or better than U.S. industry-leading models at a fraction of the cost.
"We understand that DeepSeek has willingly provided and will likely continue to provide support to China's military and intelligence operations," a senior State Department official told Reuters in an interview.
"This effort goes above and beyond open-source access to DeepSeek's AI models," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to speak about U.S. government information.
The U.S. government's assessment of DeepSeek's activities and links to the Chinese government have not been previously reported and come amid a wide-scale U.S.-China trade war.
Millions of Americans have downloaded apps that secretly route their internet traffic through Chinese companies, according to an investigation by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), including several that were recently owned by a sanctioned firm with links to China’s military.
TTP’s investigation found that one in five of the top 100 free virtual private networks in the U.S. App Store during 2024 were surreptitiously owned by Chinese companies, which are obliged to hand over their users’ browsing data to the Chinese government under the country’s national security laws. Several of the apps traced back to Qihoo 360, a firm declared by the Defense Department to be a “Chinese Military Company." Qihoo did not respond to questions about its app-related holdings.
France's Navy personnel revealed classified information about submarine patrols through the Strava fitness app, found an investigation by Le Monde.
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The UK Ministry of Defense said a breach at a third-party payroll system exposed as many as 272,000 armed forces personnel and veterans.
As “P4x,” Alejandro Caceres single-handedly disrupted the internet of an entire country. Then he tried to show the US military how it can—and should—adopt his methods.
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Insikt Group has observed TAG-70 leveraging cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities against Roundcube webmail servers in Europe, targeting government, military, and national infrastructure.
Irony, not barbed wire, cuts the deepest
American intelligence officials believe the malware could give China the power to disrupt or slow American deployments or resupply operations, including during a Chinese move against Taiwan.
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A security researcher told TechCrunch that a government server was exposing military emails to the internet because no password was set.
Hackers infiltrated the Mexican Defense Ministry, publishing millions of emails that detail the military’s growing influence over the civilian government.
The “Augury” platform includes highly sensitive network data that Team Cymru, a private company, is selling to the military. “It’s everything. There’s nothing else to capture except the smell of electricity,” one cybersecurity expert said.
ESET research uncovers attacks against several high-profile aerospace and military companies in Europe and the Middle East, with several hints suggesting a possible link to the Lazarus group.
The U.S. government "kill[s] people based on metadata," but it doesn't do that with the trove of information collected on American communications, according to former head of the National Security Agency Gen. Michael Hayden.
