Vivold Consulting
Policy & Regulation

DeepSeek aids China's military and evaded export controls, US official says

Key Insights

A U.S. official alleges DeepSeek supports China's military and evades export controls.

Stay Updated

Get the latest insights delivered to your inbox

A senior U.S. State Department official alleges that Chinese AI firm DeepSeek supports China's military and intelligence operations, sharing user data with Beijing and circumventing U.S. export restrictions on advanced semiconductors. DeepSeek, based in Hangzhou, reportedly used Southeast Asian shell companies to access restricted Nvidia H100 chips, essential for AI model training, which are banned from export to China due to national security concerns. Although DeepSeek denies using H100 chips, U.S. officials remain skeptical, suspecting high dependency on U.S. technology. The firm has been mentioned in Chinese military procurement documents and praised for its AI models, claiming parity with top U.S. systems. However, experts question the legitimacy of its reported low training costs. Despite these allegations, DeepSeek has not been placed on U.S. trade blacklists, and Nvidia asserts it complies with export laws. The case highlights ongoing geopolitical tensions and scrutiny over technological transfers and military applications in the U.S.-China tech conflict.

More in Policy & Regulation

All Policy & Regulation stories

Texas slams the brakes on data centres - and the AI buildout's easiest frontier just closed

Governor Greg Abbott announced that all new Texas data-centre projects must be audited by the Public Utility Commission and grid operator ERCOT - a sharp turn for a state whose loose regulation and cheap power made it second only to Virginia for data centres. The trigger is a staggering queue: ERCOT's interconnection requests doubled from 233GW in January to 474GW, about 90% data centres, more than five times the grid's all-time peak demand. Audits will demand power and water use, noise mitigation, light controls, tax-incentive use, and ownership details - after a voluntary survey that most operators simply ignored.

Apple sues OpenAI for trade-secret theft - alleging the scheme ran 'at every level'

Apple sued OpenAI in federal court in Northern California for trade secret theft and breach of contract, alleging former Apple employees took confidential material to benefit OpenAI's consumer hardware ambitions - and that the misconduct was directed by senior leadership, running, in Apple's words, from members of technical staff to the Chief Hardware Officer. Specific claims include an engineer who allegedly kept an Apple laptop and downloaded confidential documents, and OpenAI allegedly using Apple's proprietary metal-finishing technique by misleading a shared supplier into believing it had permission. IO Products is also named. OpenAI says it has no interest in others' trade secrets.

AWS just published the ROI case for GraphRAG: drug research cycles cut by 87%

An AWS GraphRAG deployment in pharmaceutical research cut R&D cycles by 87% - initial discovery that took six months now closes in three weeks - by fusing siloed internal databases and public literature into one queryable knowledge graph on Amazon Neptune Analytics and Bedrock (running Claude). Every answer comes with verifiable citations and a mapped reasoning path, which is exactly what regulated industries need for compliance. The architecture is modular and, crucially, transferable: any enterprise drowning in fragmented legacy data can copy this pattern.