DeepSeek has a “kill switch” baked into its system, and it does exactly what Beijing wants, a cybersecurity report finds.
The Chinese artificial intelligence startup writes significantly weaker code when running into prompts that contain Beijing’s trigger words, such as Falun Gong and Uyghurs, two groups suffering severe persecution in China.
For such requests, DeepSeek often writes code with severe security defects or outright refuses to help, the researchers say.
The report, released Nov. 20 by CrowdStrike, highlights a vulnerability untouched in previous research, which had focused largely on the app’s pro-Beijing statements.
The new finding reveals something far more subtle. It identified bias in DeepSeek’s coding assistants—ubiquitous AI-powered tools that speed up repetitive tasks, debug, and guide developers through unfamiliar programming languages….