href=https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3296477/what-does-rise-ai-firm-deepseek-mean-us-china-tech-war-and-race-talent data-entity-uuid=ce78dce6-b11b-47df-9650-2b8e90b67323 data-entity-type=node data-entity-bundle=article>Will rise of Chinese AI firm DeepSeek tilt the balance in US-China tech war?

The rise of little-known Chinese tech start-up DeepSeek has exposed weaknesses in America's "small yard, high fence" strategy to contain China's technological progress, according to experts.

US President Donald Trump has called Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek's strong showing a "wake-up call" and "positive" for America's tech sector, and also warned that he would slap tariffs on foreign-made semiconductor chips, including those made by Taiwan's TSMC, if they do not start producing them stateside.

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The model's capabilities roughly match those of advanced models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google while having significantly lower training costs. Large US tech companies may follow suit and replicate some of the training techniques that DeepSeek leveraged to drive the cost of R1 down.

href=https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3296510/us-tech-stocks-plunge-china-ais-unexpectedly-strong-showing data-entity-uuid=84ea11aa-d2a7-40cb-8188-c54a7ec9bef8 data-entity-type=node data-entity-bundle=article>US tech stocks plunge on China AI's unexpectedly strong showing

The US markets got a loud wake-up call on Monday when shares of major US artificial intelligence and semiconductor companies slumped on a wave of fear that Chinese companies were poised to surpass them in the high-stakes battle for supremacy.

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek's chatbot app has dethroned OpenAI's ChatGPT to claim the top spot on Apple's US App Store, a development that could potentially change the AI landscape due to the firm's open-sourced approach.

In a widely shared Weibo social media post, Feng Ji, founder and chief executive at Black Myth: Wukong developer Game Science, wrote that DeepSeek's achievements in AI could change China's "national fate" amid its prolonged tech war with the US.

href=https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3295662/beijing-meeting-puts-spotlight-chinas-new-face-ai-deepseek-founder-liang-wenfeng data-entity-uuid=f08f8f38-4717-426e-999e-49a7210c1ded data-entity-type=node data-entity-bundle=article>Beijing puts spotlight on China's new face of AI, DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng

The founder of artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek, touted as 2025's "biggest dark horse" in the open-source large language model (LLM) arena, emerged as the industry's new face in China at a symposium hosted by Premier Li Qiang in Beijing on Monday.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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