One Australian business has discouraged personnel from using the technology, others are scrambling for advice on its cybersecurity implications - while federal government ministers are prompting caution.

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

In the days because the Chinese business released its R1 artificial intelligence model and openly launched its chatbot and app, it has actually overthrown the AI industry.

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

Its arrival might signify a new industry shift, forum.altaycoins.com but for federal government and service, the impact is uncertain. Whereas ChatGPT's 2022 arrival captured federal governments and companies by surprise as personnel started to check out the new AI technology, at least for the arrival of Deepseek, some had a playbook.

Business as typical

A spokesperson for Telstra said the company had "a rigorous procedure to assess all AI tools, abilities, and utilize cases in our organization", including a list of approved generative AI tools, and standards on how to use them.

For now at Telstra, DeepSeek is not approved and its usage is not encouraged (although it's not officially blocked).

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

Other companies sought immediate advice on whether DeepSeek should be embraced.

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

"That's no surprise, since it appears the entire world has been in a bit of a DeepSeek frenzy - both the economically and market likely and those with the security lens," Mansted stated.

DeepSeek and federal government

CyberCX this week took the uncommon step of quickly releasing suggestions suggesting organisations, including government departments and those keeping delicate information, highly think about limiting access to DeepSeek on work devices.

"We understand that there is no proactive policy here from government ... We have actually been down this roadway before," Mansted said. "We have actually had arguments about TikTok, about Chinese surveillance video cameras, about Huawei in the telco network, and we constantly act after the truth, not before the reality ... Here, especially because the dangers are around compromise of delicate details, in regards to any info that you put into this AI assistant: it's going directly to China.

"We believed we required to act much faster this time."

Under federal AI policy executed in September 2024, agencies have till 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 challenging. The chief law officer's department, that made the decision to prohibit TikTok use on government devices, 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 supply a reaction by the time of publication.

Familiar arguments ...

Some of the reaction in Australia to DeepSeek is by now familiar. There have been calls to prohibit the technology, amidst issue over how the Chinese federal government may access user information - an echo of the days Huawei was banned from the NBN and 5G rollouts in Australia, and more recently, of the argument over prohibiting TikTok.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a strong critic of the China government, stated today that Australia "can not continue the current approach of reacting to each new tech development". It required a tech technique covering AI that included investing in sovereign AI abilities.

The market minister, Ed Husic, stated on Tuesday it was too early to make a decision on whether DeepSeek was a security risk.

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"If there is anything that provides a danger in the nationwide interest, we will constantly keep an open mind and it-viking.ch view what takes place. I believe it's prematurely to jump to conclusions on that," he said. "But, again, if we need to act, then responsible 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 approach. The EU has theirs. Canada also will have a different technique. And our local partners also are looking at this," he said.