DeepSeek reportedly raises $15B days after US restrictions
DeepSeek has reportedly raised $15 billion in one of China’s largest funding rounds, just days after the US ordered federal agencies to remove its technology over national security concerns.
DeepSeek has reportedly raised $15 billion in one of China’s largest funding rounds, just days after the US ordered federal agencies to remove its technology over national security concerns.
The US has ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products and third-party services built using its technology, citing national security concerns.
The Chinese AI lab came to prominence in early 2025 after launching a large language model that trained on a fraction of the compute power and at a fraction of the cost of the big U.S. models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic.
DeepSeek says both models are more efficient and performant than DeepSeek V3.2 due to architectural improvements, and have almost “closed the gap” with current leading models, both open and closed, on reasoning benchmarks.
Anthropic accuses DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of using 24,000 fake accounts to distill Claude’s AI capabilities, as U.S. officials debate export controls aimed at slowing China’s AI progress.
The company said that the model was trained on 15 trillion mixed visual and text tokens.
Reflection, once focused on autonomous coding agents, has raised $2B at an $8B valuation to expand into both an opensource alternative to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Western equivalent to Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek.
DeepSeek is backed by High-Flyer Capital Management, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund that uses AI to inform its trading decisions.