06.02.2025 09:54
South Korea's Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Trade have restricted access to the Chinese artificial intelligence application DeepSeek. Ministry staff are experiencing issues accessing the application from ministry computers. The government has stated that caution should be exercised in the use of DeepSeek and similar AI applications.
The personnel in South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Trade have reported that they could not access the artificial intelligence application of the Chinese company DeepSeek.
According to Yonhap's report, statements from personnel working in the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Trade regarding DeepSeek were included. Accordingly, the personnel stated that when they tried to access the AI application from the ministry's computers, they encountered a message saying "access restricted." On the other hand, no official statement has yet been made by the ministries regarding the issue.
The South Korean Ministry of the Interior had sent a notice on January 31 to government institutions recommending "caution" in the use of AI applications such as DeepSeek and ChatGPT.
REPEATED BLOCKING OF DEEPSEEK
DeepSeek, supported by the High-Flyer Capital Management fund in China, launched its open-source new model DeepSeek-R1 on January 20, developed with low costs and a small number of chips compared to other AI companies. DeepSeek, which quickly began to be intensively used worldwide, became the most downloaded AI application, surpassing the US-based ChatGPT in app stores. The US Navy, the state of Texas, Italy, and Australia had made similar decisions regarding DeepSeek as South Korea.