A bipartisan House committee on Wednesday recommended placing restrictions on the export of AI models to China after concluding that DeepSeek trained its low-cost models using data from OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It also suggested imposing prohibitions on federal agencies procuring AI models from China, which does not seem like something that was going to happen anyway. The House Select Committee on China concluded that DeepSeek poses a “profound threat” to U.S. national security by collecting user data on Americans and sending it back to China. Lawmakers claim that DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, controls DeepSeek as well as a hedge fund called High-Flyer Quant with ties to state-linked research labs.

The committee made multiple policy recommendations to prevent DeepSeek from collecting more data and intellectual property. The recommendations include: Tightening export controls for both hardware and software. Creating a system that allows export controls to be continuously updated as technology improves. Requiring chipmakers to track the end user to make sure chips don’t fall into the wrong hands.

The Chinese artificial intelligence chatbot DeepSeek poses a major national security threat to the United States through stealing Americans’ personal data, according to a new report by a House panel on the Chinese Communist Party. The investigative report by the House Select Committee on the CCP states that the user data is being covertly funneled to the ruling party and is used to manipulate information on the platform so it aligns with propaganda. DeepSeek was also trained in the use of its automatic digital conversations using material obtained illegally from U.S. AI models, the report said. House investigators also discovered that DeepSeek hardware utilizes “tens of thousands” of Nvidia microchips, including some that are restricted to export to China.