DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company based in Hangzhou, founded in July 2023 by AI enthusiast Liang Wenfeng and owned by the hedge fund High-Flyer. It gained global attention in January 2025 with the launch of its open-weight chatbot and DeepSeek-R1 model, which share their parameters publicly but keep training data private. The company built massive GPU clusters (like Fire-Flyer 2) before US chip export restrictions, and it recruits researchers from top universities and non-traditional fields to broaden its models' capabilities. DeepSeek has been linked to China's defense industry, with the People's Liberation Army adopting its chatbot for non-combat roles since March 2025. In 2026, it raised $7 billion in a Series A round (valuing it at $10 billion), but also faced accusations from Anthropic of using fraudulent accounts to train on its Claude models.