Taiwan authorities forbade officials to use Deepseek for security reasons

From the point of view of the PRC authorities, Taiwan is a rebellious island, over which they would like to restore control. For this reason, the Taiwan authorities expect some catch from the neighbors, and therefore the use of the developments of the Chinese startup Deepseek with civil servants and companies that are of strategic importance for Taiwan were prohibited.

Image source: Unsplash, John Cameron

The Ministry of Digital Technologies of Taiwan, according to Bloomberg, said on Friday that “the work of Deepseek is causing concern in the field of security related to the transboundary information transmission and data leak.” Such fears regularly arise in the jurisdiction of the geopolitical opponents of the PRC in the spread of Chinese information technologies in the world. An explicit example is an attempt by the American authorities to prohibit the activities of the Chinese social network Tiktok in the United States due to such fears.

In Italy, DeepSeek has barely gained popularity, UK authorities have so far limited the warning to their citizens and business representatives, the US Department of Defense forbade employees to use Deepseek. Companies in various countries, on their personal initiative, were banned by employees to use Deepseek. A similar situation arose at the dawn of the distribution of the American ChatGPT, when a precedent using the Samsung employee of confidential corporate data to assist in development from the chatbot led to a ban on such actions for the entire state of the company.

According to Taiwanese officials, Deepseek “threatens national information security”, as it has Chinese roots. Accordingly, it is forbidden to enter confidential or official information through the interface of this platform. This requirement applies not only to Taiwanese officials, but also to representatives of companies that form the critical infrastructure of the island.