DeepSeek is fighting a surge in fake social media accounts and websites pretending to be linked to the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, as scammers and impersonators take advantage of the frenzy surrounding the firm’s success.
Hangzhou-based DeepSeek on Thursday warned that it had only three authentic social media accounts, which could be found on Chinese platforms WeChat and RedNote, as well as US microblogging service X, formerly Twitter.
The company added that its namesake chatbot app was free to download and that it had not issued cryptocurrencies. Any social media groups set up in the name of DeepSeek to charge fees must be fraudulent, it said.
This was DeepSeek’s first official statement since its V3 large language model and R1 reasoning model grabbed global attention last month. In an X post last week, the firm also urged the public not to trust information shared by an X user posing as the start-up’s founder Liang Wenfeng, calling it a “typical impersonation account”.
DeepSeek’s surging popularity, coupled with its low profile, has made the company a prime target for fake news.
