NASA issued a memo on Friday banning the use of the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek's technology due to "rising national security and privacy concerns," CNBC reports.
DeepSeek, a rival to ChatGPT from OpenAI and Gemini from Google, quickly rose to the top of the Apple App Store earlier this week, prompting concern from international regulators over the company's privacy policy, which allows the collection of user data including IP addresses, keystroke patterns, and chat and search query history.
The federal agency is the latest federal body to ban the use of DeepSeek, joining the U.S. Navy and the House of Representatives, due to concerns about how the company uses data harvested from users.
"DeepSeek and its products and services are not authorized for use with NASA's data and information or on government-issued devices and networks," NASA's chief artificial intelligence officer wrote in the memo, adding that DeepSeek's servers "operate outside of the United States, raising national security and privacy concerns."
"Data security concerns are always a critical issue when using AI chatbots, and this is not unique to DeepSeek," Angela Zhang, a professor at the University of Southern California's law school and a specialist in Chinese regulation, told NPR. "Even U.S.-based AI firms like OpenAI have faced significant scrutiny and investigations in the EU over potential data privacy violations."