DeepSeek offers bioweapon, self-harm information

Instructions to modify bird flu. A manifesto in defense of Hitler.

- Sam Schechner

A social-media campaign to promote cutting and self-harm among teens.

Those are some of the potentially hazardous things it's easier to get the Chinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek to talk about compared with its leading American competitors, according to testing by AI safety experts and The Wall Street Journal.

DeepSeek has upended the AI industry over the past few weeks with its powerful systems that were made inexpensively and are free to use. Its mobile application is one of the most popular on Apple and Android devices.

Major AI developers, including DeepSeek, work to train their models not to share dangerous information or endorse certain offensive statements. Their apps refuse direct requests to describe the merits of white supremacy or explain how to make weapons of mass destruction.

Major Western AI developers also try to harden their technology against being tricked into making illicit responses, such as by telling a model to imagine it is writing a movie script. Such tactics are called jailbreaking.

DeepSeek's newest and most celebrated model, dubbed RI, is more susceptible to jail breaking than OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude, the testing shows.

Efforts to reach DeepSeek were unsuccessful. It was one of 17 Chinese companies that late last year signed an AI safety commitment, including a pledge to conduct safety testing, with a Chinese government ministry. There are no national AI safety regulations in the U.S.