Italy’s data protection authority on Thursday blocked access to the Chinese AI application DeepSeek to protect users' data and announced an investigation into the companies behind the chatbot. The authority,

Italy's data protection authority said on Thursday it had blocked Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek over a lack of information on its use of personal data.

DeepSeek is a new artificial intelligence chatbot that’s sending shock waves through Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Washington. The app, named after the Chinese start-up that built it, rocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store in the United States over the weekend.

DeepSeek is just one of many Chinese companies working on AI to make China the world leader in the field by 2030.

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup founded in 2023, shot to the top of Apple’s App Store free app chart after releasing a new open-source AI model it says rivals OpenAI's work. Its website was hit by outages amid a spike in interest.

Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, known for co-writing Mosaic, one of the world’s first web browsers, wrote Sunday on X that “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” likening it to the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the event that forced the U.S. to realize that its technological abilities were not unassailable.