DeepSeek
By Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd. · deepseek.com
3,8 Good
Chinese AI assistant with impressive reasoning and coding ability completely free. The catch is big: all prompts and uploads are stored on servers in China, where the state has legal right of access. Italy and South Korea have already taken action 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) →