Could Trump ban DeepSeek? What the TikTok ban saga tells us. [Video]

DeepSeek, a Chinese open-source AI system similar to ChatGPT, has risen to popularity at a peculiar time: in the midst of an ongoing legal battle over whether another Chinese tech platform, TikTok, should be allowed to run in the U.S. Some users are curious if the U.S. government would attempt to ban DeepSeek on the same grounds it has used to attempt to ban TikTok.

In short, sure, the U.S. could ban DeepSeek if it wanted to. It has the capacity to ban things it doesn’t like from countries it doesn’t trust in order to protect its citizens’ data. In the case of TikTok, lawmakers who voted in support of banning the app cited concerns about data privacy, national security, surveillance, and propaganda, primarily due to the app’s Chinese ownership. These lawmakers argue that TikTok is controlled by a “foreign adversary” — in this case, its Chinese parent company, ByteDance — and it isn’t in …