BEIJING, February 6. /TASS/. Beijing has never wanted Chinese companies to secretly obtain and store private information about their customers, China's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Guo Jiakun stated at a briefing.
"The Chinese government attaches great importance to data privacy and safety,’ Jiakun said, commenting on the DeepSeek chatbot ban in several countries. "We have never required any company or individual to illegally collect or store data, and will never do so," he added.
The spokesman noted that China has always opposed the practice of fragmenting the national security concept's framework, politicizing trade, economic, and technological matters. Beijing will firmly protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies, he stressed.
Earlier, Italy, Australia, India, the US, Japan, South Korea, and several other countries prohibited state bodies from using the DeepSeek chatbot for security reasons.
On January 20, China’s DeepSeek released a new version of the R1 chatbot, which was intended to be an improvement over OpenAI’s flagship ChatGPT.
The developers of the Chinese chatbot, however, spent far less to create their product than OpenAI, experts said. The chatbot has quickly gained popularity among users all around the world and has also led to fluctuations in stock markets due to investors' fears that Western AI-leading companies might be overestimated.