One Australian company has dissuaded staff from using the technology, others are scrambling for guidance on its cybersecurity implications - while federal government ministers are urging care.

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

In the days considering that the Chinese company released its R1 artificial intelligence design and openly launched its chatbot and app, it has actually upended the AI market.

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

Its arrival might signal a new industry shift, but for federal government and archmageriseswiki.com service, the result is unclear. Whereas ChatGPT's 2022 arrival caught governments and businesses by surprise as staff started to try out the new AI technology, bphomesteading.com at least for the arrival of Deepseek, some had a playbook.

Business as usual

A representative for Telstra said the company had "a strenuous process to assess all AI tools, capabilities, and use cases in our organization", including a list of authorized generative AI tools, pipewiki.org and standards on how to utilize them.

In the meantime at Telstra, DeepSeek is not authorized and its use is not encouraged (although it's not officially obstructed).

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

Other business sought immediate advice on whether DeepSeek must be embraced.

Major Australian cybersecurity company CyberCX's executive director of cyber intelligence, Katherine Mansted, said customers had actually currently approached the company for recommendations on whether the technology was safe.

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

DeepSeek and federal government

CyberCX today took the unusual step of quickly releasing recommendations recommending organisations, including government departments and those keeping sensitive details, highly consider restricting access to DeepSeek on work devices.

"We know that there is no proactive policy here from government ... We have actually been down this road in the past," Mansted stated. "We've had disputes about TikTok, about Chinese security video cameras, about Huawei in the telco network, and we always act after the truth, not before the truth ... Here, especially since the risks are around compromise of sensitive information, in regards to any information that you put into this AI assistant: it's going straight to China.

"We believed we needed to act faster this time."

Under federal AI policy executed in September 2024, agencies have till the end of February 2025 to release transparency files about their use of AI.

But understanding who makes decisions on the particular use of DeepSeek in the federal government has proved difficult. The chief law officer's department, that made the decision to ban TikTok utilize on federal government devices, referred questions 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 provide a reaction by the time of publication.

Familiar debates ...

Some of the response in Australia to DeepSeek is by now familiar. There have actually been calls to ban the technology, in the middle of concern over how the Chinese federal government may access user data - 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 federal government, said today that Australia "can not continue the existing technique of responding to each new tech development". It called for a tech method covering AI that included investing in sovereign AI abilities.

The industry minister, Ed Husic, said on Tuesday it was prematurely to decide on whether DeepSeek was a security risk.

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"If there is anything that presents a danger in the national interest, we will always keep an open mind and watch what occurs. I think it's prematurely to leap to conclusions on that," he stated. "But, again, if we need to act, then accountable governments do."

He worried that Australia is "in the final phases" of planning its reaction and would develop its own regulatory settings.

"The US is flagging their method. The EU has theirs. Canada similarly will have a different technique. And our local partners too are taking a look at this," he said.