South Korea watchdog to question DeepSeek over user data

South Korea will ask Chinese startup DeepSeek how it manages users’ personal information, Seoul’s data watchdog said Friday, after the company launched its powerful new AI chatbot this week.

DeepSeek claims its R1 chatbot matches the capacity of artificial intelligence pace-setters in the United States for a fraction of the investments made by American companies.

The news sparked a rout in tech titans — Nvidia dived 17 percent Monday — and raised questions about the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI in recent years.

“We intend to submit our request in writing as early as Friday to obtain information about how DeepSeek handles personal data,” an official from South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission told AFP, without giving further details.

Other countries have also raised questions about DeepSeek’s AI chatbot.

Italy launched an investigation this week into the R1 model and blocked it from processing Italian users’ data.

The Italian Data Protection Agency is asking what information is used to train DeepSeek’s AI system and, if the data is scraped from the internet, how users are informed about the processing of their data.

French watchdog CNIL also said it would question DeepSeek about its chatbot “to better understand the way it works and the risks regarding data protection”.

The Chinese startup has said it used less-advanced H800 chips — permitted for sale to China until 2023 under US export controls — to power its large learning model.

South Korean chip giants Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are key suppliers of advanced chips used in AI servers.

Worries about the impact of DeepSeek battered stocks in Seoul as the market reopened after an extended break Friday.

Samsung fell more than two percent, while SK hynix plunged almost 12 percent at one point.