Chalk this up to “No shit, Sherlock,” to resurrect an old classic that kids liked to say in the ’90s. I’m less surprised about this revelation in yesterday’s Senate hearing regarding the US’ endeavor to “win the AI race” against China, and I’m more surprised at what the singling out of DeepSeek implies.
Does it mean that Microsoft employees aren’t expressly prohibited from using other generative AIs, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude? Obviously, there’s Microsoft’s own Copilot AI, and how often, which teams, and for which tasks Microsoft employees are allowed to use that is unknown.
That aside, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, minced no words during the Senate hearing yesterday when he said, “At Microsoft, we don’t allow our employees to use the DeepSeek app,” as reported by TechCrunch.
full of concerns
Smith also said that Microsoft doesn’t carry the DeepSeek app in its app store because of users’ “data going back to China and the app creating the kinds of content that people would say are associated with Chinese propaganda,” according to Reuters.
It wasn’t always this way. When DeepSeek stormed the world with its release back in January. Microsoft initially welcomed the app onto its app store. Then it did a U-turn. “During the Senate hearing, Smith said that Microsoft had managed to go inside DeepSeek’s AI model and ‘change’ it to remove ‘harmful side effects,’” TechCrunch reported, before adding, “Microsoft did not elaborate on exactly what it did to DeepSeek’s model, referring TechCrunch to Smith’s remarks.”
It isn’t the first time that Western and Western-allied governments have expressed concerns over the Chinese app gobbling up users’ data. Not long after DeepSeek was released, the South Korean government had the apps yanked from South Korea’s Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
If you want to read Microsoft President Smith’s script (before he got to the Q&A portion of the hearing, in which he mentioned Microsoft employees and DeepSeek), head over to Microsoft’s official blog. You can read it here.