South Korea will ask Chinese startup DeepSeek how it manages users’ personal information.

Seoul’s data watchdog said Friday, after the company launched its powerful new AI chatbot this week.

DeepSeek claims its R1 chatbot matches the capacity of artificial intelligence pace-setters in the United States for a fraction of the investments made by American companies.

The news sparked a rout in tech titans — Nvidia dived 17 per cent Monday — and raised questions about the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI in recent years.

“We intend to submit our request in writing as early as Friday to obtain information about how DeepSeek handles personal data,” an official from South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission told AFP, without giving further details.

Other countries have also raised questions about DeepSeek’s AI chatbot.

Italy launched an investigation this week into the R1 model and blocked it from processing Italian users’ data.

The Italian Data Protection Agency is asking what information is used to train DeepSeek’s AI system and, if the data is scraped from the internet, how users are informed about the processing of their data.