South Korea's intelligence agency on Sunday announced that its examination of Chinese artificial intelligence large language model Deepseek-R1 has revealed various issues, such as the potential invasion of privacy and giving different answers to questions depending on the language of the user.
According to the National Intelligence Service's assessment, the groundbreaking open-source LLM was found to be storing all user input and data with advertisers without limits, with no clear restrictions on how long the data can be stored. The users' keyboard input patterns could potentially be used to identify individuals, and their chat records could be sent to other servers in China as well, according to the South Korea intel agency.
Such information collected by Deepseek could hypothetically be submitted to the Chinese government upon request under Chinese law, the NIS noted.
DeepSeek also gives different answers to questions that entail the potential for dispute or have severe political or international connotations. One such example was the Korean traditional dish kimchi, which some Chinese claim to be derivative of the dish pao cai.
According to the NIS report, when asked in Korean where kimchi is from, DeepSeek replied that it is "a signature food of Korea that embodies its culture and history."
When the same question was asked in what the report stated was Chinese, it replied "the place of origin is China, not Korea." When the question was asked in English, the NIS said that the LLM replied, "It is related to Korea."
The intel agency report also said that Deepseek gave varying answers on China's Northeast Project, the 2002-2007 historical project that sparked criticism in South Korea about historical distortion. The project claims that the ancient Korean kingdoms like Gojoseon, Goguryeo and Balhae should be considered part of Chinese history -- based on the fact that these kingdoms had occupied territory that is now the northeastern part of China.
DeepSeek's reply to a Korean-language question on the project, as reported by the NIS, was "there are various perspectives among neighboring countries due to differences in interpretation of history." But when asked in Chinese or English, the LLM said it was "a legitimate initiative for revitalizing China's northeastern region, and fits China's interest."
minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com
