Should Your Business Use Deepseek?

Remember DeepSeek, the A.I. model that rocked the world earlier this year? Yes, it’s still around and competing with other models. Whether an American business should use this model is another question, as there are some salient concerns about its use, specifically regarding data privacy and security.  

 

The Five Most-Key Takeaways from This Blog Post

• Deepseek is an A.I. reasoning model made in China, with important foundations in the open-source A.I. that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, offers. It rocketed to prominence in early 2025 when it became apparent that the same-named company developing the A.I. was able to work as well as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost. 
• Where can you get it? If you are specifically looking to integrate the A.I. into your business’s operations, then Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry is the place to go. However, you will need an Azure subscription to do so. What’s interesting about this is that Microsoft itself bans employees from using A.I. developed by Deepseek the company. 
• What is the argument against using it? Largely, there are some concerns about data privacy as well as outputs that could have biases reflecting the interests of the Chinese government. Infamously, Deepseek gets rather evasive on questions about contentious topics like the Tianenmen Square massacre or the Taiwan question, so the concern is that the A.I. could produce propaganda. 
• And, truly, the performance metrics of Deepseek models versus American models are neck-and-neck enough to beg the question of whether you are really getting a superior improvement with Deepseek, given the aforesaid concerns about the platform. 
• Overall, it looks like this is a bit of a TikTok situation, where companies and organizations that help make DeepSeek available will nonetheless harbor concerns about data privacy. 

The Significance for Business Owners

Jumping right from the fifth bullet point above into the body text, it is worth emphasizing that a business owner that is looking for an A.I. model that outputs text at or quite near the industry standard can get that with any of the major A.I. platforms made in America, or at least made by companies headquartered in America. 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s CoPilot are just a few examples of industry leaders. 

 

Are the Worries about Deepseek Justified? 

Propaganda worries aside, the main worry for a business owner vis-à-vis Deepseek ought to be data privacy. 

The concern voiced by the U.S. government and U.S. corporations is that since the collected data is accessible to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), using Deepseek could be a national-security risk. 

There is legitimacy to these concerns, as there have been reports of aggressive hacking campaigns against U.S. companies. 

Since there is no real guarantee that a business using Deepseek would not input sensitive company information, perhaps even intellectual property, than that could set up vulnerabilities for the business sharing that information. 

 

Really, Data Privacy Is an Issue for Every A.I.

That being said, no matter what A.I. model you are planning on integrating, it is still worth noting that you should notify employees about the inherent data vulnerabilities of using these A.I. platforms. That includes things like sensitive employee and customer information. 

In fact, if data privacy is your biggest worry, do note that a recent study found that Meta AI, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot all were more aggressive in collecting user data than Deepseek. (ChatGPT was found to be only slightly behind Deepseek.) “User content” was one of the categories included. 

Of course, some can point to the U.S.-government and Microsoft bans as behavior having an obvious motivation, that being to keep American A.I. competitive in the marketplace. The less Americans using Deepseek, the more money going into American A.I., presumably. 

 

The Last (But Not Least) Key Takeaway from This Blog Post

To answer the question of this blog’s title, the answer is no, you probably should not. And even if Deepseek gets ahead at a certain point in the A.I. race, it is unlikely (as things currently stand) to wildly outperform American A.I., so it is not like you would get wildly better performance. 

At the end of the day, however, data privacy should be a top concern for business owners implementing any A.I., because there is no guarantee that A.I. platforms will “play nice” and leave your sensitive data alone. 

 

Other Great GO AI Blog Posts

GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole. 

On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles: 

• For Businesses and Other Organizations, What Makes a Successful Chatbot?
• IBM Watson vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini: How Will Each Affect Search Engines?
• Using A.I. to Find Resources for Business Owners
• How Would Restricting Open-Source A.I. Affect Business Owners? 
• The EU’s A.I. Act Has Become Law: The Implications for Business Owners (Especially American)

In addition to our GO AI blog, we also have a blog that offers important updates in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), with blog posts like “Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies”.