China's DeepSeek last week launched a free assistant it says uses less data at a fraction of the cost of U.S. models. Within days, it became the most downloaded app in Apple's App Store and stirred concerns about United States' lead in AI, sparking a rout that wiped around $1 trillion off U.S. technology stocks.

The US Commerce Department is looking into whether DeepSeek - the Chinese company whose AI model's performance rocked the tech world - has been using US chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China,

The cause of investors’ panic was DeepSeek, an obscure Chinese hedge fund turned AI startup that has blown analysts away with its latest large language model, R1, released on January 20th. Consumers have flocked to DeepSeek’s chatbot,