Trump says China's DeepSeek AI ‘should be a wake-up call’ for American tech companies
President Donald Trump said Monday that the sudden rise of Chinese AI app DeepSeek "should be a wake-up call" for America's tech companies, as the runaway popularity of yet another Chinese app presented new questions for the administration and congressional leaders.
Trump said that he still expected U.S. tech companies to dominate artificial intelligence, but he acknowledged the challenge posed by DeepSeek, a low-cost AI assistant that rose to No. 1 on the Apple app store over the weekend.
"The release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing," he said while traveling in Florida.
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DeepSeek is causing a panic within U.S. tech companies and in the stock market because it has performed well in tests compared to competing AI models from Meta and OpenAI, while it was developed at a much lower cost, according to the little-known Chinese startup behind DeepSeek.
Trump said he considered the low-cost model to be "very much a positive development" for AI overall because "instead of spending billions and billions, you'll spend less, and you'll come up with, hopefully, the same solution."
DeepSeek is the latest in a series of Chinese apps to surge in popularity in the U.S. in recent weeks. Americans embraced Chinese apps RedNote and Lemon8 as alternatives to TikTok, when TikTok was on the verge of being banned temporarily in the U.S. for its own links to China.
TikTok went dark for less then a day