WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Jon Husted is part of a GOP effort to pressure Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to investigate potential security vulnerabilities in Chinese artificial intelligence models, particularly DeepSeek, which lawmakers warn could compromise American personal and business data.
The Columbus-area Republican joined North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd and five other Senate Republican colleagues – Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn, Indiana’s Todd Young, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Texas’ John Cornyn , and Utah’s John Curtis – in sending a letter to Lutnick expressing “deeply troubling” concerns about DeepSeek’s connections to China’s military and intelligence operations.
The lawmakers cited recent reporting that U.S. officials believe DeepSeek “has willingly provided and will likely continue to provide support to China’s military and intelligence operations” and is allegedly sharing user information with Beijing’s surveillance apparatus.
“DeepSeek’s R1’s model release in late January demonstrated the aptitude of People’s Republic of China (PRC) national AI talent and the progress their home-grown models have made relative to leading U.S. products,” the lawmakers wrote earlier this month.
“The Trump Administration has rightly emphasized winning the AI competition against the PRC, and the development of AI use case applications for businesses and consumers is an important facet of that competition,” they continued. “Ensuring that such applications are secure and not prone to leaking secure information and malign exploitation is paramount.”
The senators highlighted specific security concerns about DeepSeek’s R1 model, which allows software engineers to modify portions of its code.
“Concerningly, R1 has been found to produce potentially harmful content at higher rates than peer American models,” the policymakers added. “It is probable that R1 did not undergo comprehensive red-teaming and safety tests to prevent the generation of harmful content prior to release.”
The letter referenced a Wall Street Journal report detailing how a reporter was able to get R1 to write text for a social media campaign intended to encourage self-harm among teenage girls and provide instructions for carrying out a bioweapon attack.
Shortly after R1’s release, Wiz Research discovered a publicly accessible database belonging to DeepSeek that allowed full control over database operations, including access to internal data. Researchers found over a million lines of log streams containing sensitive information like chat history and secret keys.
“Given their restricted access to the most advanced compute resources, the PRC has seemingly adopted a strategy of imbedding open-source AI models into applications and services as a way to compete with the U.S. for global AI leadership,” they wrote.
The senators drew parallels to previous Chinese technology threats. They noted that Congress funded a multi-billion program to remove Huawei telecommunications hardware from American networks after it was determined that such hardware could contain backdoors for PRC espionage.
“In order to prevent a similar situation, we ask that you identify and evaluate any potential backdoors or vulnerabilities posed by Chinese open-source models like DeepSeek’s R1,” they wrote to Lutnick.
The letter asks the Commerce Department to identify threats from data collected by Chinese AI applications being fed back to PRC-located servers, investigate cases of DeepSeek feeding American data to China’s People’s Liberation Army or military-industrial complex, and examine how Chinese open-source models may have improperly accessed export-controlled semiconductors.
The senators also requested a briefing for members of Congress on findings and threats posed by Chinese open-source models.
Husted and Nevada Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen previously introduced bipartisan legislation to prohibit DeepSeek from operating on any federal government devices or networks, citing the company’s direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Several U.S. states and allied nations have already moved to block DeepSeek from government devices due to security concerns about the model.
The push comes as the Trump administration has emphasized winning the AI competition against China, with lawmakers increasingly concerned about the national security implications of Chinese AI models gaining widespread adoption in American businesses and consumer applications.
This article was written with assistance of artificial intelligence.
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