Italy Regulator Requests DeepSeek for Personal Data Information

TMTPOST -- One of the most active European regulators is requesting DeepSeek for personal data information, highlighting regulatory risks of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) upstart whose models and chatbot services rocked Silicon Valley and Wall Street these days.

Credit：LinkedIn

The Italian Data Protection Authority, also known as Garante, announced on Tuesday it has asked DeepSeek to provide information considering the possible high risk for data of millions of people in Italy.

Garante required Hangzhou-based DeepSeek and its affiliates in China to confirm what personal data is collected, from which sources, for what purposes, on what legal basis for their processing, and whether the data are stored on servers located in China.

The regulator also asked DeepSeek and related companies to answer what type of information is used to train their AI system and, in the event that personal data is collected through web scraping activities, to clarify how users registered and those not registered to the service have been or are informed about the processing of their data.

DeepSeek and its affiliates shall respond with answers within 20 days, Garante said in a statement on its website.

A White House official on Tuesday also expressed his concerns over DeepSeek. In an interview with Fox News Tuesday, the White House AI and crypto “czar” David Sacks raised concerns about DeepSeek, noting “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek relied on the output of OpenAI’s models to help develop its own technology.

Asked about whether DeepSeek stole intellectual property(IP) from the U.S., Sacks said it is "possible." Then he described a machine learning technique called distillation. Under the technique, developers can leverage the outputs of a larger model to enable a smaller one to achieve similar performance on a specific task.

For Sacks, the distillation process allows student AI models interrogate parent models, mimic their logic, and "suck" their knowledge from them.

"There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models," Sacks said. "And I think one of the things you're going to see over the next few months is our leading AI companies taking steps to try and prevent distillation…that would definitely slow down some of these copycat models."

In response to Sacks’ allegations, OpenAI stated in a statement that it is aware of companies from China and other areas are constantly trying to distill the models of leading U.S. companies. "As the leading builder of AI, we engage in countermeasures to protect our IP, including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models, and believe as we go forward that it is critically important that we are working closely with the U.S. government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology,"said OpenAI.

Just as his warning posted on X on Monday, Sacks warned American AI companies against complacent. "I think that our AI companies got a little distracted," Sacks told Fox News. "To be honest, I think that maybe they got a little bit complacent. They didn't realize how close these Chinese companies were to them. They wasted a lot of time on things like DEI."

Sacks admitted DeepSeek’s achievement, calling R1, the reasoning model launched earlier this month, basically comparable in capabilities to the OpenAI 01 model, which came out about four months ago. “I think the Chinese companies are catching up very fast,” said Sacks, estimating the U.S. AI firms have around three to six months ahead of their Chinese peers.

Sacks still believes U.S. can maintain its leadership as there are still great advantages to having a lot of chips, especially the most advanced ones, while he agreed the rise of DeepSeek is waking up American AI sector.