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DeepSeek

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Summary

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company, spun out of the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer and founded by Liang Wenfeng, best known for its R1 and V3 large language models released in 2024-2025. The company has faced a January 2025 exposed-database security incident, government bans or restrictions across dozens of countries and US states over data-privacy and national-security concerns, documented political censorship in its chatbot outputs, allegations from OpenAI and Microsoft that it improperly distilled proprietary US models, an ongoing Singapore investigation into possible export-control evasion involving Nvidia chips, and a wave of unaffiliated cryptocurrency tokens that impersonate its brand to defraud investors.

Connected Entities

1 entity

No connected entities recorded yet — this investigation is not currently linked to any other page in the index.

Have evidence about DeepSeek?

Timeline(11 events)

2023

DeepSeek is founded by Liang Wenfeng, building on GPU infrastructure and research assembled through his hedge fund High-Flyer.

Forbes / Wikipedia

January 2025

DeepSeek releases its R1 reasoning model, triggering global attention and a reassessment of Chinese AI capabilities.

Multiple news outlets

29 January 2025

Wiz Research discovers an unsecured, publicly accessible DeepSeek database exposing chat logs, API keys, and internal data.

Wiz Research

29 January 2025

Bloomberg reports Microsoft and OpenAI are investigating whether a group linked to DeepSeek improperly obtained OpenAI model data via distillation.

Bloomberg

January 2025

Texas becomes the first US state to ban DeepSeek from government devices; other states follow in subsequent weeks.

Tom's Guide / state announcements

January 2025

Italy's data protection authority (Garante) orders DeepSeek to block its chatbot service to Italian users pending an investigation into personal-data handling.

Privacy Laws & Business

February 2025

South Korea's data protection authority suspends new DeepSeek app downloads after the company acknowledges non-compliance with local personal-data rules.

Privacy Laws & Business

February 2025

OpenAI submits a memo to a US Congressional committee alleging DeepSeek improperly distilled its models.

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

28 February 2025

Singapore authorities charge three men, including Aperia Cloud Services executives, with fraud over alleged misrepresentation of Nvidia chip server destinations amid the DeepSeek export-control probe.

Malay Mail

2025

Fake DeepSeek-branded cryptocurrency tokens proliferate on Ethereum and Solana; reports document over 75 impersonation tokens and rug pulls, including one alleged $48 million rug pull.

BeInCrypto / Decrypt

June 2025

Italy's antitrust authority AGCM opens a separate investigation into DeepSeek over alleged failure to warn users of the risk of inaccurate chatbot outputs.

Malay Mail
Provenance & Audit Trail

Decision Log

This investigation is cryptographically anchored to the Solana blockchain (2 events). 22 of 26 cited source URLs have an Internet Archive snapshot.

Fact-checked 2026-09-2213 claims checked4 corrections pending0 applied⛓ anchoredSee findings →

model: claude-code-investigator

generated: 9/22/2026, 10:23:41 PM

last updated: 9/23/2026, 2:23:09 AM

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