South Korea Suspends DeepSeek From App Stores

South Korea has temporarily suspended Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek from the country’s app stores, with regulators citing privacy concerns.

The country’s Personal Information Protection Commission said the app would be re-introduced after “improvements and remedies” were made to ensure it complies with data protection laws.

Existing DeepSeek app installations will continue to work, and users can also access it via a browser.

The commission said the app had been removed from Apple’s App Store and Google Play as of Saturday evening.

Nationwide ban

DeepSeek became hugely popular in South Korea, as in many other countries around the world, in late January after launching open-source AI models that perform on par with US rivals, but which it said were developed for a fraction of the cost.

The South Korean data office said it had decided “it would inevitably take a considerable amount of time to correct” the issues it had identified.

DeepSeek appointed an agent in the country last week to work on the problems, the regulator said.

Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said at a briefing with journalists on Monday that the Chinese government has always required companies to operate overseas in strict compliance with local laws and regulations.

“We also hope that relevant countries will avoid taking the approach of generalising and politicising economic, trade and technological issues,” Guo said.

Since late January DeepSeek has jumped in popularity to become one of the world’s most widely used AI tools, challenging assumptions about US dominance of the industry.

Privacy issues

At the same time, authorities have raised privacy and national security concerns over the data collected by the app being collected and processed in China.

Several South Korean government bodies banned DeepSeek’s use from officially issued devices, as have Taiwan and Australia.

Australia said DeepSeek posed an “unacceptable risk” to national security.

The Italian data protection regulator suspended DeepSeek’s availability in the country while it discusses legal compliance issues with the firm, after taking similar measures with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2023.

Data authorities in France and Ireland have also posed questions to the start-up over its use of data such as email addresses, dates of birth and prompts entered into the app by users.

US lawmakers have proposed a federal law that would ban DeepSeek from government devices, while Texas, Virginia and New York states have introduced rules for state employees.