Chinese tech startup DeepSeek says hit with 'large-scale malicious attacks'

Chinese tech startup DeepSeek said it was hit by a cyber attack on Monday that disrupted users' ability to register on the site.

The company, whose artificial intelligence chatbot has sent the tech world into a frenzy, said that it had suffered large-scale malicious attacks on its services. Registered users could log in normally, DeepSeek said.

DeepSeek began attracting more attention in the AI industry last month when it released a new AI model that it boasted was on par with similar models from US companies such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and was more cost-effective in its use of expensive Nvidia chips to train the system on huge troves of data.

The chatbot became more widely accessible when it appeared on Apple and Google app stores early this year.

By Monday, DeepSeek's AI assistant had become the No. 1 downloaded free app on Apple's iPhone store. The jump in popularity fuelled debates over competition between the US and China in developing AI technology.

But some US tech industry observers said they were worried about the idea that the Chinese startup has caught up with the American companies at the forefront of generative AI at a fraction of the cost.

DeepSeek was founded in Hangzhou, China in 2023. The company released its first AI large language model later that year.