Relying on AI carries risks, cybersecurity expert warns amid China’s DeepSeek craze

Excessive reliance on artificial intelligence for decision-making could pose a security risk, exposing users to hackers and other bad actors, a cybersecurity expert has warned amid a nationwide frenzy over China’s home-grown chatbot DeepSeek.

Qi Xiangdong, chairman of Beijing-based cybersecurity firm Qi An Xin (QAX), told the Digital China Summit in the southeastern city of Fuzhou on Tuesday that large AI models brought security challenges and risks, according to domestic media reports.

“As AI becomes more deeply integrated across industries, large models will grow increasingly powerful, and users may become overly dependent on AI-assisted decision-making and judgment,” said Qi, who is also a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the country’s top political advisory body.

“From an external threat perspective, hackers can exploit vulnerabilities or engage in data ‘poisoning’ to manipulate the model’s decisions, committing malicious acts under the guise of a large model,” he said.

“From an internal operations perspective, if the staff involved introduce erroneous information while updating the knowledge base, it can contaminate the model’s learning environment, leading to incorrect outputs.”

Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek in January launched a chatbot on par with US rivals such as ChatGPT, stunning the tech world and triggering a nationwide AI frenzy among the general public and government agencies.

Authorities have firmly backed the push for widespread AI use. Beijing has hailed DeepSeek as a success for the country’s innovation drive in the face of Western sanctions that have limited China’s access to hi-tech chips.

South China Morning Post