US Senator Josh Hawley recently proposed a new bill and potentially new law that could see people in the US facing jail time and significant fines, every time someone uses the Chinese AI app, DeepSeek. Should the bill pass, people could face up to 20 years in jail, a US$1 million (~RM4.42 million), or both.
The bill, titled “Decoupling America’s Intelligence Capabilities from China Act”, was introduced last week. The bill would basically make it illegal for the US to import or export AI products to and from China, which in turn means that someone who knowingly downloads a Chinese-developed AI model such as, you guessed it, DeepSeek.
“Every dollar and gig of data that flows into Chinese AI are dollars and data that will ultimately be used against the United States,” Senator Hawley said in a statement. “America cannot afford to empower our greatest adversary at the expense of our own strength. Ensuring American economic superiority means cutting China off from American ingenuity and halting the subsidization of CCP innovation.”
DeepSeek recently came into prominence last week, promoting itself as a low-cost AI model that needed just US$6 million (~RM26.5 million) to train – a fraction of the cost of the current AI training models. Needless to say, the news caused NVIDIA’s market value to plummet by US$600 billion (~RM2.65 trillion), in the short term.
Scepticism soon arose about DeepSeek’s low-cost training claim, and almost immediately after, the US government began investigating whether the Chinese startup had trained its model using chips that the government had restricted. Shortly after, it was alleged that it could have purchased 50,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, and spent upwards of US$1 billion (~RM4.42 billion) in building servers with said GPUs.
Security experts have also warned that DeepSeek could pose an even greater threat to businesses and governments than other Chinese-owned apps like TikTok, as data is stored in servers in China.
(Source: The Independent, 404 Media)
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