A report released yesterday by the US House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) revealed that up to 85 percent of responses on Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek are altered or suppressed to cater to the CCP’s narrative.
The chatbot uses automated filtering of responses and built-in biases to serve as a “digital enforcer of the CCP,” manipulating information pertinent to democracy, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Chinese human rights abuses, in accordance with Chinese law and seeking to “actively erase dissent,” it said.
The report, titled “Deepseek Unmasked: Exposing the CCP's Latest Tool For Spying, Stealing, and Subverting U.S. Export Control Restrictions,” detailed the findings of an investigation into the Chinese AI system and gave two policy recommendations.
Photo: Reuters
The committee said the chatbot, launched on Jan. 20 and founded by a CCP-linked, Hangzhou-based startup whose controlling shareholder is Liang Wenfeng (梁文鋒), co-founder of quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, is a “profound threat to [US] security.”
The investigation found that DeepSeek channels information from the US user base directly to the CCP via backend infrastructure connected to China Mobile, listed as a Chinese military company by the US government.
Millions of US users’ data therefore serves as a “high-value open-source intelligence asset for the CCP,” the committee said.
Moreover, it found it was “highly likely” that Deepseek used unauthorized model distillation — the systematic extraction and replication of the reasoning capabilities of existing AI models.
DeepSeek personnel allegedly used a “sophisticated network of international banking channels” and aliases to infiltrate US-based AI chatbots such as OpenAI, it said.
The allegations were supported by OpenAI in a statement written to the Select Committee.
Furthermore, it is suspected that DeepSeek used tens of thousands of chips from US semiconductor giant Nvidia that are currently restricted from being exported to the PRC, it said.
In October 2023, the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security imposed stringent export controls on advanced computing chips to curb China’s access to semiconductors for AI and military purposes.
Nvidia’s Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) then created an advanced chip that could circumvent US export controls before the policies came into effect that year, the report said.
The US Department of Commerce is currently investigating whether DeepSeek illegally imported export-controlled advanced Nvidia chips via Singapore, an intermediary country with lesser export controls, it added.
The Select Committee has further sent a formal letter to Nvidia requesting further information on its sales to Southeast Asia and China.
Since the release of DeepSeek, Singaporean authorities have charged three individuals in connection with illegal exports of Nvidia chips to China, it said.
Nvidia released a statement yesterday on X to counter the allegations, saying it follows US government directions “to the letter,” while providing US jobs, infrastructure and billions of dollars of tax revenue to the US treasury to alleviate the US trade deficit.
The statement claimed that suspicious revenue in Singapore is connected to shipments to “other locations, including the United States and Taiwan, not to China.”
The report detailed two policy recommendations.
Firstly, it recommended that the US government expand export controls and improve enforcement through increased cooperation with Japanese and Dutch authorities and increasing funding to the Bureau of Industry and Security.
This would also involve imposing remote access controls on data centers, compute clusters and models, while implementing whistleblower incentive and protection programs, it said.
The Trump administration has moved this week to restrict Nvidia’s sale of AI chips to China and is weighing penalties against DeepSeek for the purchase of US technology, according to the New York Times.
It is also considering barring US users’ access to the chatbot, it said.
Secondly, the committee recommended the US government “prevent and prepare for strategic surprise related to advanced AI.”
Misuse of AI could affect government functioning, including defense and national security, requiring interagency coordination to monitor AI development in adversary regions, evaluate AI safety and develop domestic AI capabilities, it said.
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