By Eduardo Baptista and Alessandro Diviggiano
BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese bloggers, state media and local citizens have welcomed DeepSeek’s global success with pride and glee, with some saying the homegrown AI startup’s meteoric rise is a sign China is beating back Washington’s attempts to contain the country’s tech industry.
DeepSeek last week launched a free AI assistant that it says uses less data at a fraction of the cost of incumbent services. By Monday, it had overtaken U.S. rival ChatGPT in downloads from Apple’s App Store, triggering a global selloff in tech shares.
The Chinese company’s apparent ability to match OpenAI’s capabilities at a much lower cost has posed questions over the sustainability of the business models and profit margins of U.S. AI giants such as Nvidia and Microsoft.
In China, it has raised hopes that the country can successfully resist Washington’s export controls targeting access to cutting-edge semiconductors.
“This also symbolises U.S. containment, persecution, and sanctions against China in the field of advanced technology has completely failed,” military affairs commentator Chen Xi wrote on his WeChat account on Wednesday.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that DeepSeek’s technology should act as a spur for American companies and it was good that Chinese firms had come up with a cheaper, faster method of artificial intelligence.
The provincial government’s media office in Zhejiang, where DeepSeek is based, published a lengthy essay on Wednesday that quickly went viral and was read more than 100,000 times.
“The moon overseas is not actually more round, whatever others can do, we can also do it and even do it better,” the essay said, while criticising online voices that were both overly triumphant and overly pessimistic about China’s technological development.
“We need to leave the narrow prism of triumphalism,” the department argued.
Still, the sentiment around DeepSeek echoes public reaction to Huawei’s 2023 surprise release of its high-end Mate 60 Pro smartphone during a visit by then U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who led the Biden Administration’s efforts to restrict Chinese access to high-end AI chips.
At the time, the state-backed Global Times said that Huawei’s ability to produce a high-end smartphone despite years of targeted U.S. sanctions showed Washington had failed in its “extreme crackdown” on China.
Chen Jianuo, a 38-year-old employee at a sustainable development magazine in Beijing, said she felt proud of DeepSeek’s popularity overseas after noticing it was a trending topic on Chinese social media platform Weibo.
“China has made great progress in the development of artificial intelligence, and I hope that the technological development of our country will get better and better,” she said.
Leo Li, a 24-year-old student, said that he was happy a Chinese company could be on a par with the likes of Meta and OpenAI and that he would consider using DeepSeek’s AI tools.
“I feel quite proud of it, because as a Chinese citizen, we have this (AI) research and development that has become a global sensation,” he said.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
