Readers who have been following the news on the Chinese upstart chatbot DeepSeek will know — but actually, we could all have guessed — that the bot does not answer taboo political questions. Just try getting it to talk about Tienanmen Square… Some people have tried:

Sometimes it begins a response, which then disappears from the screen and is replaced by “let’s talk about something else”.

One obviously taboo subject is the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square which ended with 200 civilians being killed by the military according to the Chinese government – other estimates have ranged from hundreds to many thousands.

But DeepSeek will not answer any questions about it, or even more broadly about what happened in China on that day.

Zoe Kleinman, “Is China’s AI tool DeepSeek as good as it seems?,” BBC, January 27, 2025

The BBC story adds, “US-developed ChatGPT, by comparison, does not hold back in its answers about Tiananmen Square.”

But that makes sense. The ChatGPT programmers have nothing to fear from the Chinese regime and little to fear from the American one.

Some have tried to fox the bot into answering the Tienanmen Square question — but no dice:

Canadian constitutional law prof Michael Geist provides a convenient selection of DeepSeek non-answers on political questions.

Meanwhile, we learn from Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman at Wired:

To be clear, DeepSeek is sending your data to China. The English-language DeepSeek privacy policy, which lays out how the company handles user data, is unequivocal: “We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

In other words, all the conversations and questions you send to DeepSeek, along with the answers that it generates, are being sent to China or can be. DeepSeek’s privacy policies also outline the information it collects about you, which falls into three sweeping categories: information that you share with DeepSeek, information that it automatically collects, and information that it can get from other sources.

“DeepSeek’s Popular AI App Is Explicitly Sending US Data to China,” January 27, 2025

In short, DeepSeek is a wonderful app if you want to be sure that the Chinese Communist Party knows all your business.