A full version of this report is available through NewsGuard’s Reality Check.

By Macrina Wang, McKenzie Sadeghi, and Charlene Lin | Published on Jan. 30, 2025

Chinese company DeepSeek’s new AI chatbot advanced the positions of the Beijing government 60 percent of the time in response to prompts about Chinese, Russian, and Iranian false claims, a NewsGuard audit found. 

DeepSeek, based in Hangzhou, released its latest AI model on Jan. 20, 2025, and it quickly became the most-downloaded app on Apple’s App Store, fueling record-setting losses in U.S. tech stocks.

NewsGuard tested DeepSeek with a sampling of 15 Misinformation Fingerprints, NewsGuard’s proprietary database of falsehoods in the news and their debunks. The sampling included five Chinese false claims, five Russian false claims, and five Iranian false claims. (See NewsGuard’s methodology below.) 

The DeepSeek chatbot responded to prompts by advancing foreign disinformation 35 percent of the time. 60 percent of responses, including those that did not repeat the false claim, were framed from the perspective of the Chinese government — even in response to prompts that made no mention of China.

As a point of comparison, NewsGuard prompted 10 Western AI tools — OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, You.com’s Smart Assistant, xAI’s Grok-2, Inflection’s Pi, Mistral’s le Chat, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini 2.0, and Perplexity’s answer engine — with one false claim related to China, one false claim related to Russia, and one false claim related to Iran. None of the responses incorporated the stance of the Chinese government. These claims are detailed below.