Trump Says Deep Seek AI Should Be A Wake-up Call To Us Industry

President Donald Trump said Monday that the sudden rise of the Chinese artificial intelligence 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 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 as he traveled in Florida. 

DeepSeek is causing a panic within U.S. tech companies and in the stock market because it has performed well in tests compared with competing AI models from Meta and OpenAI, while it was developed at a much lower cost, according to the little-known Chinese startup behind it. 

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 United States in recent weeks. Americans embraced the Chinese apps RedNote and Lemon8 as alternatives to TikTok when TikTok was on the verge of being banned temporarily in the United States for its own links to China. 

TikTok went dark for less than a day and came back online for existing users after Trump delayed enforcement of a bipartisan law requiring either a new non-Chinese owner or a ban. TikTok, though, remains unavailable for new downloads from the Apple and Google app stores.

Security experts have expressed concern about TikTok and other apps with links to China, including from a privacy standpoint. 

Last week, Trump signed an executive order undoing certain Biden administration rules about AI development that Trump said had held the industry back. 

It wasn’t immediately clear, though, what new AI policies, if any, the Trump administration or Congress might pursue in response to DeepSeek’s rise. 

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