Chinese AI models deemed a security risk by new US government report

Chinese models lag behind their American counterparts in performance, cost, security and adoption, despite their growing global popularity, according to a new report from the US government.

Describing Chinese models as “adversary AI”, the report released on Tuesday by the Centre for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Department of Commerce claimed that models such as those from DeepSeek posed risks to AI developers, consumers and US national security because of their security shortcomings and censorship.

The report comes after US President Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, released in July, called for the evaluation of frontier Chinese models’ capabilities and alignment with state narratives.

DeepSeek, China’s most high-profile AI company, has come under fire in the US where it has been accused of stealing user data and amplifying Chinese state narratives.

The evaluation conducted by CAISI marks the first time the US government has produced a comprehensive assessment of DeepSeek’s capabilities and popularity in relation to leading US models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5, its open-sourced model gpt-oss and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.