Health authorities and pharmaceutical corporations are taking measures to block the use of the AI chatbot from the Chinese generative artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek due to concerns about information leakage.
According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety on the 7th, access to "DeepSeek AI" will be blocked until security safety concerns are resolved. The domestic pharmaceutical and bio industry is also banning employees from accessing DeepSeek.
DeepSeek has garnered global attention for creating an AI that rivals the performance of the U.S. AI company "OpenAI"'s "ChatGPT" at a low expense. However, security concerns have been raised, including excessive collection of user information, such as gathering users' keyboard input patterns.
Daewoong Pharmaceutical decided to block access to DeepSeek from employees' work PCs starting on the 6th. Yuhan Corporation is not using generative AI such as DeepSeek or ChatGPT for security reasons. Samsung Biologics has already been blocking AI-related sites like ChatGPT since last year and immediately blocked DeepSeek after its launch.
Kakao Healthcare informed employees to refrain from using DeepSeek for work purposes following its internal AI utilization policy. Celltrion is currently preparing internal guidelines regarding AI usage policies, including the use of DeepSeek. Medical AI corporations, including Lunit, have stated that they do not use third-party models such as DeepSeek as they are developing their own AI models.
Major government departments, including the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of National Defense, have also restricted the use of DeepSeek due to concerns about personal information leakage.
Countries are increasingly banning the use of DeepSeek at the government level. The U.S. Department of Defense and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have also blocked access to DeepSeek. Taiwan has fully banned government employees from using DeepSeek, stating it is for the purpose of "ensuring national information security." Italy also issued a national ban on DeepSeek last month.