The Italian regulator, known as Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali, has ordered to block the Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek due to a lack of information on how it is processing users' personal data.
The regulator has also ordered Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence, the companies behind the chatbot, to immediately stop processing the data of Italian users.
The decision was taken after an assessment of what kind of personal data the companies collect, and for what legal reasons.
"The ban, adopted to protect the data of Italian users, was the result of the response received today from the companies, the content of which was found to be completely insufficient," Garante said.
In addition to restricting access to the data, the regulator has launched an official investigation into Chinese startup DeepSeek.
DeepSeek has not yet commented on the Italian regulator's decision.
The DeepSeek app is currently unavailable in the Apple and Google stores in Italy.
The decision mirrors similar action taken in March 2023 against American company OpenAI and its ChatGPT, which was also temporarily blocked due to privacy concerns.
DeepSeek, which positions itself as an affordable alternative to American AI technologies, made waves in the market when its free AI assistant outperformed OpenAI's ChatGPT in the App Store rankings. This caused the tech company's shares to plummet, which also resulted in a major cyber attack on DeepSeek's servers.
