South Korea has banned new downloads of China’s Deepseek Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots, according to the country’s personal data protection watchdog.
The agency said that once “improvements and remedies” are made to ensure that the AI model complies with the country’s personal data protection laws, it will be available again to South Korean users.
In a week since making global headlines, Deepseek has jumped to the top of the app store, which has been extremely popular in Korea, with over 1 million users every week.
But its rise in popularity has attracted scrutiny from countries around the world who have placed restrictions on apps over privacy and national security concerns.
The South Korean Privacy Commission said the Deepseek app was no longer available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play on Saturday night.
It came after several South Korean government agencies banned employees from downloading chatbots to work equipment.
South Korean representative president Choi Sang Mok describes deep shakes as “shocking,” which could have an impact on the country’s industry beyond AI.
Despite the suspension of new downloads, those who already have it on their mobile phone will just continue using it or access it from the Deepseek website.
China’s Deepseek rocked America’s trust in the technology industry, markets and AI leadership when it released its latest app late last month.
The rapid rise as one of the world’s most popular AI chatbots has sparked concerns in various jurisdictions.
Apart from Korea, Taiwan and Australia have also banned it from all government equipment.
The Australian government argues that the ban poses to national security because of the “unacceptable risk” rather than the app’s Chinese origins.
Italian regulators that temporarily banned ChatGpt in 2023 did the same with DeepSeek.
The company is being asked to address privacy policy concerns before it becomes available again in the app store.
Data protection authorities in France and Ireland have also raised questions about DeepSeek about how they process citizens’ personal information, such as whether they are stored on Chinese servers, as their privacy policy suggests.
It also says that, like other generation AI tools, it collects information such as email addresses and date of birth, and uses input prompts to improve the product.
Meanwhile, US lawmakers proposed a bill banning DeepSeek from federal devices, citing surveillance concerns.
At the state government level, Texas, Virginia and New York have already implemented such rules for their employees.
Deepseek’s “Large Language Models” (LLM) has inference capabilities comparable to US models such as Openai’s O1, but requires a small cost to train and run.
It raises questions about the billions of dollars invested in AI infrastructure in the US and elsewhere.
