DeepSeek’s cheap information comes at a high price for the West

This week, Chinese technology has shown the West the challenge it faces – ruthless, implacable and impossible to ignore. The unveiling of the Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek has not only disrupted the business models of America’s tech behemoths; it has also shown that, in the race to develop the tools for economic hegemony, Beijing is set on supremacy. The launch of DeepSeek came just days before the CIA’s conclusion that, on the balance of probabilities, the Covid virus was incubated in a Wuhan lab – a man-made killer, not a product of nature’s evolutionary mischief. China stands revealed as a power bent on using science to secure not human flourishing but geopolitical dominance for its Leninist leadership.

DeepSeek is a technological breakthrough of staggering boldness. It processes information at a fraction of the cost of existing AI systems. As one commentator noted, models which have been assumed to need the power of a Ferrari to function have been overtaken by an e-bike. Its ability to perform apparently endless useful functions at high speed and low cost has already led to it becoming the most downloaded app in the US.

But DeepSeek is no neutral fact-checker, no autonomous cruncher of data. It is, like every enterprise in China, a weapon in Xi Jinping’s armoury. One user who asked about the Uighurs – the Muslim population of the province of Xinjiang who provide Beijing with slave labour – found that DeepSeek is hard-wired to serve regime interests. Just as it started to give an honest answer, referencing the widely reported human rights abuses, the words fluttered from the screen to be replaced with the message: ‘Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.’ A similar response greeted an inquiry about the Tiananmen Square massacre.