Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, known for co-writing Mosaic, one of the world’s first web browsers, wrote Sunday on X that “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” likening it to the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the event that forced the U.S. to realize that its technological abilities were not unassailable.

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup founded in 2023, shot to the top of Apple’s App Store free app chart after releasing a new open-source AI model it says rivals OpenAI's work. Its website was hit by outages amid a spike in interest.

The start-up had become a key player in the “Chinese Large-Model Technology Avengers Team” that would counter US AI dominance, said another. China’s delight, however, spelled pain for several giant US technology companies as investors questioned whether DeepSeek’s breakthrough undermined the case for their colossal spending on AI infrastructure.

Top White House advisers this week expressed alarm that China's DeepSeek may have benefited from a method that allegedly piggybacks off the advances of U.S. rivals called "distillation." The technique,

SINGAPORE—The unexpected success of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has revealed cracks in U.S. efforts to contain China’s technology ambitions, challenging both Washington and Silicon Valley to rethink how best to preserve American supremacy.

Deepseek collects similar data to American-based AI models, but Chinese laws could make that data more accessible to the government.

Security experts are urging people to be cautious if considering using emerging AI chatbot DeepSeek because of the app’s links to China and the potential implications for personal data. The chatbot has upended the AI market with its emergence as a rival to the likes of ChatGPT and OpenAI,