One Australian business has dissuaded personnel from utilizing the technology, others are rushing for recommendations on its cybersecurity ramifications - while federal government ministers are prompting care.

But others have actually welcomed DeepSeek's arrival, calling for Australia to follow China's lead in establishing effective yet less energy-intensive AI innovation.

In the days since the Chinese business introduced its R1 expert system design and openly launched its chatbot and app, it has overthrown the AI industry.

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Several worldwide market leaders saw their market price drop after the launch, as DeepSeek showed AI could be developed using a portion of the expense and processing required to train models such as ChatGPT or Meta's Llama.

Its arrival may indicate a new market shift, wiki.vifm.info but for government and company, the impact is unclear. Whereas ChatGPT's 2022 arrival captured governments and businesses by surprise as staff began to experiment with the brand-new AI technology, at least for the arrival of Deepseek, some had a playbook.

Business as normal

A spokesperson for Telstra said the company had "a strenuous procedure to assess all AI tools, abilities, and utilize cases in our organization", consisting of a list of authorized generative AI tools, and guidelines on how to utilize them.

For now at Telstra, DeepSeek is not authorized and its use is not encouraged (although it's not officially obstructed).

"Our preferred partner is MS Copilot, and we're presenting 21,000 Copilot for Microsoft 365 licences to our staff members."

Other companies sought instant suggestions on whether DeepSeek need to be embraced.

Major Australian cybersecurity company CyberCX's executive director of cyber intelligence, Katherine Mansted, said consumers had already approached the business for suggestions on whether the innovation was safe.

"That's not a surprise, because it appears the entire world has remained in a bit of a DeepSeek craze - both the financially and market likely and those with the security lens," Mansted said.

DeepSeek and government

CyberCX this week took the unusual action of rapidly issuing advice advising organisations, consisting of federal government departments and those storing sensitive information, strongly consider restricting access to DeepSeek on work gadgets.

"We understand that there is no proactive policy here from federal government ... We have actually been down this road before," Mansted said. "We've had debates about TikTok, about Chinese surveillance video cameras, about Huawei in the telco network, and we constantly act after the fact, not before the fact ... Here, especially because the hazards are around compromise of sensitive details, in terms of any information that you put into this AI assistant: it's going straight to China.

"We thought we needed to act quicker this time."

Under federal AI policy carried out in September 2024, companies have up until the end of February 2025 to release transparency documents about their use of AI.

But understanding who makes decisions on the particular use of DeepSeek in the federal government has proved tricky. The chief law officer's department, that made the choice to ban TikTok use on federal government gadgets, referred queries to the Digital Transformation Agency, which in turn referred enquires to the Department of Home Affairs.

Home Affairs was asked on Thursday for its main policy and did not offer an action by the time of publication.

Familiar disputes ...

Some of the response in Australia to DeepSeek is by now familiar. There have been calls to ban the technology, amidst issue over how the Chinese government may access user data - an echo of the days Huawei was banned from the NBN and 5G rollouts in Australia, and more recently, of the dispute over banning TikTok.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a strong critic of the China government, said today that Australia "can not continue the current method of reacting to each brand-new tech advancement". It called for a tech strategy covering AI that included investing in sovereign AI abilities.

The industry minister, Ed Husic, stated on Tuesday it was prematurely to make a decision on whether DeepSeek was a security risk.

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"If there is anything that provides a threat in the national interest, rocksoff.org we will constantly keep an open mind and view what happens. I think it's prematurely to jump to conclusions on that," he said. "But, once again, if we have to act, then responsible federal governments do."

He worried that Australia is "in the lasts" of preparing its response and would develop its own regulative settings.

"The US is flagging their technique. The EU has theirs. Canada also will have a different method. And our local partners as well are taking a look at this," he said.