Italy’s data protection authority on Thursday blocked access to the Chinese AI application DeepSeek to protect users' data and announced an investigation into the companies behind the chatbot. The authority,

DeepSeek is just one of many Chinese companies working on AI to make China the world leader in the field by 2030.

Some AI researchers hailed DeepSeek’s R1 as a breakthrough on the same level as DeepMind’s AlphaZero, a 2017 model that became superhuman at the board games Chess and Go by purely playing against itself and improving, rather than observing any human games.