Microsoft workers are banned from utilizing DeepSeek app, president says 

Microsoft workers aren’t allowed to make use of DeepSeek on account of information safety and propaganda issues, Microsoft vice chairman and president Brad Smith mentioned in a Senate listening to in the present day.

“At Microsoft we don’t enable our workers to make use of the DeepSeek app,” Smith mentioned, referring to DeepSeek’s utility service (which is accessible on each desktop and cellular.)

Smith mentioned Microsoft hasn’t put DeepSeek in its app retailer over these issues, both. 

Though numerous organizations and even nations have imposed restrictions on DeepSeek, that is the primary time Microsoft has gone public about such a ban.

Smith mentioned the restriction stems from the danger that information might be saved in China and that DeepSeek’s solutions could possibly be influenced by “Chinese language propaganda.”

DeepSeek’s privateness coverage states it shops consumer information on Chinese language servers. Such information is topic  to Chinese language regulation, which mandates cooperation with the nation’s intelligence companies. DeepSeek additionally closely censors subjects thought-about delicate by the Chinese language authorities.

Regardless of Smith’s important feedback about DeepSeek, Microsoft supplied up DeepSeek’s R1 mannequin on its Azure cloud service shortly after it went viral earlier this yr.

However that’s a bit totally different from providing DeepSeek’s chatbot app itself. Since DeepSeek is open supply, anyone can obtain the mannequin, retailer it on their very own servers and provide it to their shoppers with out sending the info again to China. 

That, nevertheless, doesn’t take away different dangers just like the mannequin spreading propaganda or producing insecure code.

In the course of the Senate listening to, Smith mentioned that Microsoft had managed to go inside DeepSeek’s AI mannequin and “change” it to take away “dangerous unwanted effects.” Microsoft didn’t elaborate on precisely what it did to DeepSeek’s mannequin, referring TechCrunch to Smith’s remarks.

In its preliminary launch of DeepSeek on Azure, Microsoft wrote that DeepSeek underwent  “rigorous pink teaming and security evaluations” earlier than it was placed on Azure.

Whereas we are able to’t assist declaring that DeepSeek’s app can also be a direct competitor to Microsoft’s personal Copilot web search chat app, Microsoft doesn’t ban all such chat rivals from its Home windows app retailer. 

Perplexity is accessible within the Home windows app retailer, as an illustration. Though any apps by Microsoft’s archrival Google (together with the Chrome browser and Google’s chatbot Gemini) didn’t floor in our webstore search.