Italy’s data protection authority has blocked use of Chinese tech startup DeepSeek’s AI application to protect Italians’ data and announced an investigation into the companies behind the chatbot.

Italy's data protection authority said on Thursday it had blocked Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek over a lack of information on its use of personal data.

If knowing that Meta saves your data indefinitely makes you uneasy, DeepSeek's policy is even more of a cybersecurity red flag because of China's governmental authority over its private sector. An undefined retention period exposes user data to even more risk to security breaches.

DeepSeek caused a market tsunami on Monday as investors digested the news that its new R1 model appeared to perform well despite being trained with less sophisticated chips, somet

OpenAI has accused Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek of using its proprietary models to train an open-source competitor.