DeepSeek
By Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd. · deepseek.com
3,8 Good
Chinese AI assistant that is completely free and impresses with its reasoning and coding – but every prompt and upload is stored on servers in China, where the state has a legal right of access. Italy and South Korea have already acted against the service.
Best for: Technical and scientific research without a budget, but never with sensitive data or personal information
Pros
- Completely free chat app with frontier-class reasoning ability
- Open model weights that can be run locally or with EU providers
- Extremely cheap API (from approx. USD 0.14 per million tokens)
- Strong at math, code and long reasoning chains
Cons
- All data is stored and processed in China according to the company's own privacy policy
- Chinese legislation forces the company to hand over data to the state, so GDPR protection is effectively absent
- Regulatory measures in Italy, South Korea and Germany during 2025
- Built-in censorship of politically sensitive topics and no enterprise agreements (DPA) for the cloud service
Quick facts
| Price | Free |
|---|---|
| Origin | Outside EU (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd.) |
| Categories | Writing, Research |
| EU data storage | No |
| GDPR terms (DPA) | No |
Sources & evidence
Claims about data storage, jurisdiction and compliance should be verifiable. Here is the evidence behind the statements above:
- DeepSeek – Privacy Policy (Hangzhou DeepSeek as company, data storage in China) →
- DeepSeek – Terms of Use (Chinese law applies, no DPA or GDPR terms) →
- DeepSeek – API price list (from approx. USD 0.14 per million tokens) →
- DeepSeek – Official GitHub organization (open source and model weights) →