PATRICK TUCKER
Days after China’s DeepSeek detailed an approach to generative AI that needs just a fraction of the computing power used to build prominent U.S. tools, the global conversation around AI and national security—from how the Pentagon buys and uses AI to how foreign powers might disrupt American life, including privacy—is changing.
DeepSeek’s announcement drew a collective wail from the White House, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. In Washington, D.C., President Trump called it a “wake-up for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing” against China. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the National Security Council is currently reviewing the app. The Navy has already banned it. On Wall Street, chip maker Nvidia’s stock tumbled. OpenAI, DeepSeek’s closest U.S. competitor, is crying foul and claiming the app essentially distills their own model.
If you believe the United States “must win the AI competition that is intensifying strategic competition with China,” as former Google chairman Eric Schmidt and former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work wrote in 2021, then DeepSeek is a big deal.
Why is DeepSeek so significant? For one thing, it’s much more open-source than other models. But the defining technical innovation lies in the model’s ability to distill advanced reasoning capabilities from massive models into smaller, more efficient counterparts. One DeepSeek model often outperforms larger open-source alternatives, setting a new standard (or at least a very public one) for compact AI performance.
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