South Korea has prohibited new downloads from the Chatbot of Deep Artificial Intelligence (AI) from China, according to the Data Protection Dog in the country.
The government agency has said that the AI model would become available to South Korean users when “improvements and remedies” will be made to ensure that it complies with the laws on the protection of personal data in the country.
During the week following the world’s big titles, Deepseek became extremely popular in South Korea jumping up from application stores with more than a million weekly users.
But its increase in popularity has also drawn the attention of countries around the world which have imposed restrictions on the application concerning the problems of confidentiality and national security.
The South Korea Personal Information Protection Committee said that the Deepseek application had become unavailable on the Apple and Google Play App Store on Saturday evening.
He came after several South Korean government agencies prohibited their employees from downloading the chatbot to their work devices.
The acting president of South Korea, Choi Sang-Mok, described Deepseek as a “shock”, which could have an impact on the industries of the country, beyond AI.
Despite the suspension of new downloads, people who already have it on their phones will be able to continue to use it or they can simply access it via the Deepseek website.
Deepseek of China has shaken the technological industry, the markets and the confidence of America in its direction of AI, when it published its last application at the end of last month.
Its rapid increase as one of the favorite AI chatbots in the world has aroused concerns in different jurisdictions.
Aside from South Korea, Taiwan and Australia have also prohibited it from all government devices.
The Italian regulator, which briefly prohibited Chatgpt in 2023, did the same with Deepseek, which was invited to respond to concerns about its privacy policy before becoming available in application stores.
Meanwhile, the United States legislators have proposed a bill prohibiting Deepseek from federal devices, citing surveillance problems.
In terms of the state-state, Texas, Virginia and New York have already introduced such rules for their employees.
Deepseek’s “LLG model” model (LLM) has reasoning capacity comparable to American models such as O1 of Openai, but would need a fraction of the cost to train and run.
This has raised questions about the billions of dollars invested in AI infrastructure in the United States and elsewhere.
Additional report by Jean Mackenzie in Seoul
