DeepSeek AI: US Firms Choose Low-Cost Chinese AI, Data Risks?

A new report shows DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, is gaining popularity among US firms. These companies are using DeepSeek as a cheaper alternative to services like Anthropic and OpenAI. DeepSeek ranked first for breakout growth among SaaS vendors for Ramp customers last month. This comes despite earlier concerns about the Chinese government censoring prompts. What's interesting is DeepSeek's own terms of service state they collect, process, and store personal data in the People’s Republic of China. PRC law requires companies to cooperate with state intelligence requests without a warrant. This means any data, like prompts, documents, or customer records, sent to DeepSeek goes directly to a Chinese provider. US firms using DeepSeek are paying them directly and routing their data through the service. This raises significant security concerns for businesses.