South Korea's industry ministry has temporarily blocked employee access to Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek due to security concerns, a ministry official said on Wednesday, as the government urges caution on generative AI services.

South Korea's industry ministry has temporarily banned employee access to Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek due to security concerns, a ministry official said on Wednesday, as the government urges caution on generative AI services.

The defence and trade ministries cited concerns over data privacy following similar moves by Italy and Australia.

DeepSeek recent explosion in popularity continues to be a problem for the AI startup. In a notification spotted by Bloomberg, the company said it was temporarily limiting access to its application programming interface service in response to a shortage of server capacity.

DeepSeek, the Chinese startup whose artificial-intelligence model roiled global markets last week, said it would restrict access to its application programming interface service because of shortages with its server capacity.

DeepSeek AI is restricting access to its application programming due to an overwhelming response from the market which is constraining its capacity. The Chinese start-up rattled markets across the globe with the release of it models in January which resulted in investors selling off tech stock due to fears that the emergence of low-cost Chinese