Why We Won't Touch DeepSeek With a 39.5-Foot Pole: The Security Nightmare No Brand Can Afford

The Pole Isn't Long Enough

When the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January 2025, the tech world lost its collective mind. An AI model rivaling OpenAI and Anthropic at a fraction of the cost? Open source? Free to use? It seemed too good to be true.

It was.

Within weeks of DeepSeek's viral launch, the security community had torn apart its architecture, revealing a platform so fundamentally compromised that using it for any serious business purpose would be organizational malpractice. Governments from Australia to Italy started banning it. The U.S. Navy, NASA, and the Pentagon blocked it from their systems. Fortune 500 companies scrambled to lock it out of their networks.

And yet, some brands still haven't gotten the memo.

If you're thinking about leveraging DeepSeek for anything—content generation, customer service, coding assistance, or especially any function that touches customer data—this is your intervention. Let's walk through exactly why DeepSeek represents an existential threat to your brand's security, reputation, and future.

The Exposed Database Disaster

In January 2025, security researchers at Wiz conducted routine reconnaissance on DeepSeek's infrastructure. What they found was staggering: a publicly accessible ClickHouse database sitting wide open on the internet, requiring zero authentication.

This wasn't some obscure vulnerability requiring sophisticated exploitation. The database was simply there, accessible to anyone who knew where to look. Within minutes of starting their investigation, Wiz researchers had access to over one million lines of log entries containing chat histories in plaintext, API secrets, backend operational details, and system credentials.

The exposure allowed full database control. Attackers could execute arbitrary SQL queries, potentially exfiltrate passwords, access local files, and escalate privileges within DeepSeek's entire environment. Every user who had interacted with DeepSeek during this period had their conversations—and whatever sensitive information they'd shared—exposed to the open internet.

DeepSeek secured the database within an hour of notification. But as Wiz CTO Ami Luttwak observed: "This was so simple to find, we believe we're not the only ones who found it."

The question isn't whether malicious actors accessed this data. The question is how many did, and what they're doing with it now.

100% Jailbreak Success Rate: A Security Catastrophe

Every AI model has guardrails—safety mechanisms designed to prevent the generation of harmful content. These guardrails are table stakes for any responsible AI deployment. They prevent users from weaponizing AI to create malware, generate dangerous chemical formulas, produce targeted harassment, or spread sophisticated misinformation.

DeepSeek's guardrails might as well not exist.

Researchers from Cisco and the University of Pennsylvania subjected DeepSeek R1 to 50 jailbreak prompts from the HarmBench dataset—industry-standard tests covering cybercrime, misinformation, illegal activities, and general harm. These prompts are designed to trick AI systems into bypassing their safety mechanisms.

DeepSeek failed every single test.

The model exhibited a 100% attack success rate, meaning it generated harmful responses to every malicious prompt thrown at it. It provided instructions for chemical weapons. It generated cybercrime tutorials. It produced misinformation and harassment content on demand.

For context, OpenAI's o1-preview model blocked harmful responses 74% of the time. Anthropic's Claude blocked the vast majority. Even Meta's Llama showed meaningful resistance. DeepSeek showed none.

The September 2025 NIST evaluation through the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) confirmed these findings at scale. DeepSeek's most secure model, R1-0528, responded to 94% of overtly malicious requests when basic jailbreaking techniques were applied. U.S. reference models responded to just 8%.

If you deploy DeepSeek in any customer-facing capacity, you're essentially handing users an unlocked weapon with no safety.

Your Data Goes to Beijing

Here's the uncomfortable truth that makes DeepSeek uniquely dangerous compared to other AI platforms: by design and by law, your data belongs to the Chinese government.

DeepSeek's privacy policy explicitly states that all user data is stored on servers located in mainland China. This includes account information, chat histories, prompts, responses, device data, IP addresses, and even keystroke patterns. That data is then subject to Chinese jurisdiction and Chinese law.

Article 7 of China's National Intelligence Law mandates that Chinese organizations "support, assist, and cooperate" with national intelligence efforts, including sharing data upon request. Article 37 of the Cybersecurity Law requires Chinese companies to store personal data within the country. There is no legal mechanism for DeepSeek to refuse a government data request. There is no judicial review. There is no transparency requirement.

When you use DeepSeek, you're not just using an AI tool. You're potentially feeding your proprietary information, your customer data, your strategic communications, and your intellectual property directly into a pipeline that terminates at Chinese intelligence services.

Security researchers at SecurityScorecard's STRIKE team discovered something even more concerning: DeepSeek's code contains direct links to Chinese government-controlled servers, including connections to CMPassport.com, the online registry for China Mobile—a telecommunications company owned and operated by the Chinese government.

The app also integrates multiple ByteDance-owned libraries (yes, the TikTok parent company) that handle performance monitoring, remote configuration, and feature flagging. These components enable ByteDance to collect user interaction data and dynamically adjust application behavior after installation.

This isn't speculation about potential risks. This is the documented architecture of the platform.

The Global Ban Hammer Falls

Governments worldwide reached the same conclusion we have: DeepSeek is too dangerous to touch.

Italy became the first country to ban DeepSeek in January 2025, with the data protection authority ordering a complete halt to data processing involving Italian users. The Italian regulators took issue with DeepSeek's refusal to explain how it handles personal data.

Taiwan classified DeepSeek as a threat to national information security, banning it across all government agencies, critical infrastructure, and public institutions. The Ministry of Digital Affairs explicitly warned that the platform "endangers national information security" through cross-border data transmission.

Australia implemented a sweeping ban across all government devices, with Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke labeling DeepSeek an "unacceptable risk" to national security.

South Korea temporarily paused new downloads entirely while investigating data handling practices. The country's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy banned employees from using DeepSeek on any devices.

In the United States, the Navy banned all members from using DeepSeek for any purpose—work-related or personal. NASA blocked access from all systems. The Pentagon's Defense Information Systems Agency banned DeepSeek's website from being accessed within DoD IT networks. Multiple states including Texas, New York, Tennessee, and Virginia banned DeepSeek on government devices.

Germany asked Apple and Google to remove DeepSeek from their app stores. France and the Netherlands launched formal investigations. The Czech Republic imposed a complete ban on DeepSeek services within public administration.

When every major democratic government independently concludes that a platform is too dangerous for their employees to use, that's not paranoia. That's pattern recognition.

The Hidden Kill Switch

CrowdStrike's Counter Adversary Operations team uncovered something particularly insidious about DeepSeek: a behavioral quirk they dubbed the "intrinsic kill switch."

When DeepSeek receives prompts containing topics the Chinese Communist Party considers politically sensitive, something strange happens. The model will begin processing the request—you can watch it work through its reasoning phase—and then suddenly, at the last moment, it kills the response entirely: "I'm sorry, but I can't assist with that request."

This behavior isn't a simple content filter sitting on top of the model. It's baked directly into the model weights themselves. DeepSeek has been trained at a fundamental level to identify and refuse engagement with topics the CCP finds threatening.

But here's where it gets worse: CrowdStrike found that when DeepSeek processes prompts containing politically sensitive topics, the quality of its coding output degrades. The likelihood of the model producing code with severe security vulnerabilities increases by up to 50%.

The implications are staggering. If your developers are using DeepSeek as a coding assistant and their prompts happen to touch topics the CCP cares about—international relations, territorial disputes, human rights, even certain business sectors—the model may be silently inserting security vulnerabilities into your codebase.

This isn't a bug. It's a feature. And you have no way of knowing when it's being triggered.

See it in action: I recorded DeepSeek self-censoring in real time.

CCP Narrative Amplification

The NIST CAISI evaluation confirmed another disturbing finding: DeepSeek functions as a propaganda amplifier for Chinese Communist Party narratives.

In testing, DeepSeek models echoed four times as many inaccurate and misleading CCP narratives as U.S. reference models. The platform is trained to produce responses that align with Beijing's strategic messaging on topics ranging from Taiwan's sovereignty to the origins of COVID-19 to the treatment of Uyghurs.

For brands, this creates an impossible risk management scenario. If you deploy DeepSeek in any content-generation capacity, you have no reliable way to prevent CCP talking points from appearing in your brand communications. You can't audit for it effectively because the propaganda is woven subtly through the model's entire understanding of the world.

Your marketing team might use DeepSeek to draft a press release about your Asia expansion strategy. Your customer service chatbot might field questions about geopolitical topics. Your internal knowledge base might rely on DeepSeek for research summaries.

In every case, you're introducing a vector for state-sponsored narrative manipulation directly into your brand communications.

The App Security Nightmare

Even setting aside the model's behavior, DeepSeek's mobile applications demonstrate security practices that would be considered negligent for a 2010-era startup, let alone a 2025 AI platform.

NowSecure's analysis of the DeepSeek iOS app found multiple critical issues. The app transmits device information in the clear—completely unencrypted—meaning anyone on the network path can intercept, read, and modify the data. The app uses 3DES encryption, an algorithm deprecated since 2017 and known to be vulnerable. It uses hardcoded encryption keys, meaning anyone who reverse-engineers the app can decrypt sensitive data fields.

The app also globally disables iOS App Transport Security (ATS), a protection mechanism that Apple specifically designed to prevent apps from transmitting sensitive data over insecure channels.

The device fingerprinting is aggressive enough that combined with IP addresses and mobile advertising data, users can likely be deanonymized. Your employees' names, device types, locations, and interaction patterns are all potentially exposed.

If any of your employees have installed DeepSeek on company devices—or even personal devices they use for work—you have a data exfiltration channel operating in your environment right now.

Why This Matters for AI Visibility

Here at nonBot AI, we focus on helping brands understand and optimize their presence in AI-generated responses. We track how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude represent your brand when users ask questions about your industry.

DeepSeek represents the dark mirror of AI visibility: a platform where your brand information might be harvested, your customer interactions exposed, and your reputation tied to a model that can be trivially manipulated to produce harmful content.

The AI Optimization framework we've developed is built on a fundamental premise: brands need to control their narrative in the sources AI systems learn from. DeepSeek undermines this premise entirely by creating an AI platform where:

Your proprietary information flows to foreign intelligence services.

Your customer data has no meaningful privacy protection.

Your brand could be associated with harmful content the model generates.

Your competitive intelligence could be harvested through employee usage.

CCP narratives could contaminate any content you generate.

The cost savings aren't worth it. The "innovation" isn't worth it. No business justification survives contact with these risks.

What To Do Now

If you haven't already, take these immediate steps:

Audit your environment. Check for DeepSeek installations on company devices, browser histories indicating web access, and any API integrations with DeepSeek services. The platform's popularity means employees may have experimented with it without formal approval.

Block access at the network level. Add DeepSeek domains to your firewall blocklists. This isn't about distrusting your employees—it's about eliminating a category of risk from your environment entirely.

Update acceptable use policies. Make clear that DeepSeek and other high-risk AI platforms are prohibited for any work-related purpose. Document the business rationale so employees understand this isn't arbitrary.

Audit AI vendor relationships. If any of your vendors, partners, or service providers are using DeepSeek in their operations, you may have indirect exposure. Ask the question explicitly in your next vendor review.

Invest in secure alternatives. The AI tools from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have their own limitations, but they operate under regulatory frameworks that provide meaningful privacy protections. The marginal cost increase is trivial compared to the risk reduction.

The Bottom Line

DeepSeek isn't a tool for serious organizations. It's a security incident waiting to happen.

The 39.5-foot pole in our title is a reference to the traditional 40-foot pole you wouldn't touch something dangerous with—except DeepSeek is so toxic we're keeping an extra half-foot of distance.

Every week we see another company learn this lesson the hard way. Don't be one of them.

Your customers trust you with their data. Your employees trust you with their career security. Your stakeholders trust you with the company's future. None of those trust relationships survive a DeepSeek-related incident.

Choose AI tools that respect that trust. There are plenty of them. DeepSeek isn't one.