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DeepSeek's success hailed as US export control failure

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Provincial media office in DeepSeek's Zhejiang base

praises

company

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Similar reaction seen when sanctions-hit Huawei released

Mate 60

Pro

By Eduardo Baptista and Alessandro Diviggiano

BEIJING, Jan 30 (Reuters) - Chinese bloggers, state

media and local citizens have welcomed DeepSeek's global success

with pride and glee, with some saying the homegrown AI startup's

meteoric rise is a sign China is beating back Washington's

attempts to contain the country's tech industry.

DeepSeek last week launched a free AI assistant that it says

uses less data at a fraction of the cost of incumbent services.

By Monday, it had overtaken U.S. rival ChatGPT in downloads from

Apple's App Store, triggering a global selloff in tech shares.

The Chinese company's apparent ability to match OpenAI's

capabilities at a much lower cost has posed questions over the

sustainability of the business models and profit margins of U.S.

AI giants such as Nvidia ( NVDA ) and Microsoft ( MSFT ).

In China, it has raised hopes that the country can

successfully resist Washington's export controls targeting

access to cutting-edge semiconductors.

"This also symbolises U.S. containment, persecution, and

sanctions against China in the field of advanced technology has

completely failed," military affairs commentator Chen Xi wrote

on his WeChat account on Wednesday.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that DeepSeek's

technology should act as a spur for American companies and it

was good that Chinese firms had come up with a cheaper, faster

method of artificial intelligence.

The provincial government's media office in Zhejiang, where

DeepSeek is based, published a lengthy essay on Wednesday that

quickly went viral and was read more than 100,000 times.

"The moon overseas is not actually more round, whatever

others can do, we can also do it and even do it better," the

essay said, while criticising online voices that were both

overly triumphant and overly pessimistic about China's

technological development.

"We need to leave the narrow prism of triumphalism," the

department argued.

Still, the sentiment around DeepSeek echoes public reaction

to Huawei's 2023 surprise release of its high-end Mate 60 Pro

smartphone during a visit by then U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina

Raimondo, who led the Biden Administration's efforts to restrict

Chinese access to high-end AI chips.

At the time, the state-backed Global Times said that

Huawei's ability to produce a high-end smartphone despite years

of targeted U.S. sanctions showed Washington had failed in its

"extreme crackdown" on China.

Chen Jianuo, a 38-year-old employee at a sustainable

development magazine in Beijing, said she felt proud of

DeepSeek's popularity overseas after noticing it was a trending

topic on Chinese social media platform Weibo.

"China has made great progress in the development of

artificial intelligence, and I hope that the technological

development of our country will get better and better," she

said.

Leo Li, a 24-year-old student, said that he was happy a

Chinese company could be on a par with the likes of Meta and

OpenAI and that he would consider using DeepSeek's AI tools.

"I feel quite proud of it, because as a Chinese citizen, we

have this (AI) research and development that has become a global

sensation," he said.