A frenzy over an artificial intelligence chatbot made by Chinese tech startup DeepSeek was upending stock markets Monday and fueling debates over the economic and geopolitical competition between the U.

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.

With a model that offers comparable performance at seemingly a fraction of the cost, the DeepSeek chatbot is causing a reckoning over American dominance in the tech industry. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on advanced chip sales to slow down progress in AI elsewhere.

If you’ve been keeping up with the news regarding emerging technology such as generative artificial intelligence, you’re likely already aware of popular services such as ChatGPT and Meta AI. While these models have been disrupting the tech space for the last few years,

KEY TAKEAWAYS OpenAI said Wednesday that it is probing whether Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek improperly used its data to launch the low-cost model that spooked markets Monday.The comment by OpenAI follows a Bloomberg report that both OpenAI and its biggest backer Microsoft are investigating DeepSeek's model.

As US companies pour billions of dollars into advancing artificial intelligence, a little-known Chinese startup has seemingly done the impossible. DeepSeek unveiled a chatbot app that performs as well if not better than those of Silicon Valley giants,