DeepSeek Has a Very Interesting Answer About the Tiananmen Square Massacre

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has made a huge splash with its ChatGPT competitor, claiming it developed a similarly-performing AI assistant at a fraction of the cost.

It's a serious contender — at least in the eyes of investors, with AI chipmaker Nvidia's shares sliding by around 15 percent Monday morning.

But the app also has some significant shortcomings. Like other Chinese AI models, DeepSeek is beholden to the rules of state censors, as Bloomberg reports, refusing to directly address sensitive topics like the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre or China-Taiwan relations.

Users on Reddit found that when asked about a "famous picture" of a "man with grocery bags in front of tanks," the large language model starts to oblige, producing text about the world-famous "Tank Man" photograph taken on the day of the Tiananmen Square protests.

But moments later, the text disappears and is replaced with a generic error message, as seen in a screen recording shared by one Reddit user, seemingly showing how the app is (however sloppily) abiding by Chinese censorship rules.

"Sorry, that's beyond my current scope," the message reads. "Let's talk about something else."

As another user on Reddit found, even asking it more broadly about criticisms of the Chinese government, it had an intriguing answer.

"Sorry, I’m not sure how to approach this type of question yet," it wrote. "Let’s chat about math, coding, and logic problems instead!"

The user got the same response when they included the name of Chinese president Xi Jinping in their query.

"I literally just asked it if Taiwan was its own country then it answered like [ChatGPT] would then right after replaced it with a message like 'I'm not programmed to answer that kind of question yet' or some such," one user wrote.

One user on Hacker News claims to have circumvented these censorship rules by asking the chatbot for a detailed breakdown of what happened in 1989, resulting in an elaborate answer.

While China's "Great Firewall" censorship rules are well-known and established, OpenAI's ChatGPT also has plenty of guardrails limiting what it can say.

Those may be retreating somewhat, though; earlier this month, OpenAI was caught quietly removing language endorsing "politically unbiased" AI, a design purportedly inspired to "streamline" its documentation, as TechCrunch reported at the time. Meanwhile, conservatives have long accused AI companies of censoring their viewpoints, with multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk founding an AI startup called xAI to develop an "anti-woke" AI (with less-than-stellar results).

Last week, president Donald Trump signed an executive order, calling on the AI industry to "develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas."

Whether that'll lead to the loosening of guardrails — or the establishment of a new set of state censorship rules to further a far-right agenda — for US-based chatbots like ChatGPT remains to be seen.

More on DeepSeek: Silicon Valley in Shambles as Chinese Startup Creates Top-Tier AI Without Billions of Investment

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