Government may soon issue advisory against Chinese AI model DeepSeek

Indian government is expected to issue an advisory soon, warning users about potential data privacy and cyber espionage risks associated with the use of the Chinese artificial intelligence tool, DeepSeek. According to an Economic Times report, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) under the aegis of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, has undertaken a thorough enquiry of potential harm to Indian citizens using the genAI application on their devices. Quoting sources, the report further adds that the enquiry includes tracking user behaviour from prompts given to the chatbot, device data such as battery usage, other app interactions and even keystrokes of fingers.
“There are concerns over the usage of DeepSeek, we can’t use it like we use ChatGPT (a rival genAI application from US-based OpenAI). We have to be careful,” a senior government official told the publication. The official further added that a common advisory against the use of DeepSeek is likely to be issued soon.
“India as a nation is not comfortable with allowing China access to Indians’ data because there is no accountability to how and where they store sensitive data,” another official said.
“The app collects data in three forms- ‘user prompts’ (including images, documents, chat history), ‘automatically collected information’ (device data, metadata of other applications, cookie tracking) and information from ‘other sources’ (crowdsourced or publicly available data),” said an official in knowledge of the investigation by CERT-In. It can even track how many users uninstalled ChatGPT, or whether they have reduced time spent on Google Gemini app. “A more alarming issue here is that the AI conversational bot can spread misinformation to manipulate political discourse,” the person noted.

Countries like Italy and Australia along with US federal agencies have already banned the use of DeepSeek on official devices.
Last month, the union finance ministry issued an internal advisory, warning that the use of AI applications on office computers and devices presents risks to the security of sensitive government information. The advisory reads: "It has been determined that AI tools and AI apps (such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, etc.) in office computers and devices pose risks for confidentiality of (government) data and documents."