DeepSeek took off as an AI superstar a year ago - but could it also be a major security risk? These experts think so

DeepSeek.

• Experts find DeepSeek-R1 produces dangerously insecure code when political terms are included in prompts
• Half of the politically sensitive prompts trigger DeepSeek-R1 to refuse to generate any code
• Hard-coded secrets and insecure input handling frequently appear under politically charged prompts

When it released in January 2025, DeepSeek-R1, a Chinese large language model (LLM) caused a frenzy and has since been widely adopted as a coding assistant.