Microsoft has openly said that its workers are not allowed to use the DeepSeek app. This announcement came from Brad Smith, the company’s Vice Chairman and President, during a recent hearing in the U.S. Senate. He said the decision was made because of serious concerns about user privacy and the risk of biased content being shared through the app.
According to Smith, Microsoft does not allow DeepSeek on company devices and hasn’t included the app in its official store either. Although other organizations and even governments have taken similar steps, this is the first time Microsoft has spoken publicly about such a restriction.
The main worry is where the app stores user data. DeepSeek's privacy terms say that all user information is saved on servers based in China. This is important because Chinese laws require companies to hand over data if asked by the government. That means any data stored through DeepSeek could be accessed by Chinese authorities.
Another major issue is how the app answers questions. It’s been noted that DeepSeek avoids topics that the Chinese government sees as sensitive. This has led to fears that the app’s responses might be influenced by government-approved messaging instead of being neutral or fact-based.
Interestingly, even though Microsoft is blocking the app itself, it did allow DeepSeek’s AI model—called R1—to be used through its Azure cloud service earlier this year. But that version works differently. Developers can download it and run it on their own servers without sending any data back to China. This makes it more secure, at least in terms of data storage.
However, there are still other risks involved. Even if the model is hosted outside China, it might still share biased content or produce low-quality or unsafe code.
At the Senate hearing, Smith added that Microsoft took extra steps to make the model safer before making it available. He said the company made internal changes to reduce any harmful behavior from the model, but didn’t go into detail about what those changes were.
When DeepSeek was first added to Azure, Microsoft said the model had passed safety checks and gone through deep testing to make sure it met company standards.
Some people have pointed out that DeepSeek could be seen as a competitor to Microsoft’s own chatbot, Copilot. But Microsoft doesn’t block every competing chatbot. For example, Perplexity is available in the Windows app store. Still, some other popular apps, like Google’s Chrome browser and its Gemini chatbot, weren’t found during a search of the store.
The latest "Qwen2.5-Omni-7B" is a multimodal model- it can process inputs like audio/video, text, and images- while also creating real-time text and natural speech responses, Alibaba’s cloud website reports. It also said that the model can be used on edge devices such as smartphones, providing higher efficiency without giving up on performance.
According to Alibaba, the “unique combination makes it the perfect foundation for developing agile, cost-effective AI agents that deliver tangible value, especially intelligent voice applications.” For instance, the AI can be used to assist visually impaired individuals to navigate their environment via real-time audio description.
The latest model is open-sourced on forums GitHub and Hugging Face, after a rising trend in China post DeepSeek breakthrough R1 model open-source. Open-source means a software in which the source code is created freely on web for potential modification and redistribution.
In recent years, Alibaba claims it has open-sourced more that 200 generative AI models. In the noise of China’s AI dominance intensified by DeepSeek due to its shoe string budget and capabilities, Alibaba and genAI competitors are also releasing new, cost-cutting models and services an exceptional case.
Last week, Chinese tech mammoth Baidu launched a new multimodal foundational model and its first reasoning-based model. Likewise, Alibaba introduced its updated Qwen 2.5 AI model in January and also launched a new variant of its AI assistant tool Quark this month.
Alibaba has also made strong commitments to its AI plan, recently, it announced a plan to put $53 billion in its cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years, even surpassing its spending in the space over the past decade.
CNBC talked with Kai Wang, Asia Senior equity analyst at Morningstar, Mr Kai told CNBC that “large Chinese tech players such as Alibaba, which build data centers to meet the computing needs of AI in addition to building their own LLMs, are well positioned to benefit from China's post-DeepSeek AI boom.” According to CNBC, “Alibaba secured a major win for its AI business last month when it confirmed that the company was partnering with Apple to roll out AI integration for iPhones sold in China.”