DeepSeek’s AI avoids answering 85% of prompts on ‘sensitive topics’ related to China
AI chatbot DeepSeek has taken the world by storm,
topping app store charts
and sending Silicon Valley and Wall Street
into meltdown
.
An offshoot of Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, DeepSeek’s cost-to-performance ratio
makes for impressive reading
compared to incumbents such as OpenAI. However, reports
have increasingly documented
some of the things the AI chatbot is unwilling to discuss, including thorny topics like the
Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, and Taiwan
.
A
new report
from the folks at
PromptFoo
, an Andreessen Horowitz-
backed
startup that helps companies find vulnerabilities in AI applications, has found that DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model refused to answer some 85% of 1,360 sensitive-topic “prompts,” and the model’s canned responses were replete with an “over-the-top nationalistic tone” often offered instead.
The researchers also noted that DeepSeek can be easily jailbroken, suggesting that the Chinese lab has “implemented CCP [Chinese Communist Party] censorship in a crude, blunt-force way.”
The full dataset of sensitive prompts are
available on Hugging Face
.