Development on the first DeepSeek R1 clone might have started with the announcement of the Open-R1 open-source project.

Microsoft has moved surprisingly quickly to bring R1 to its Azure customers.

Microsoft MSFT.O has made Chinese startup DeepSeek's R1 artificial intelligence model available on its Azure cloud computing platform and GitHub tool for developers, the U.S. company said on Wednesday.

DeepSeek is a new artificial intelligence chatbot that’s sending shock waves through Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Washington. The app, named after the Chinese start-up that built it, rocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store in the United States over the weekend.

DeepSeek’s emergence has raised concerns that China may have overtaken the US in the artificial intelligence race despite restrictions on its access to the most advanced chips.

OpenAI claims to have found evidence that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek secretly used data produced by OpenAI’s technology to improve their own AI models, according to the Financial Times. If true, DeepSeek would be in violation of OpenAI’s terms of service.

OpenAI—which faces multiple lawsuits for using content without permission—accuses DeepSeek of 'distillation,' a technique that use larger models' outputs to improve smaller ones.

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial-intelligence startup that’s just over a year old, has stirred awe and consternation in Silicon Valley after demonstrating AI models that offer comparable performance to the world’s best chatbots at seemingly a fraction of their development cost.

DeepSeek has Silicon Valley in awe and investors in a frenzy.The Chinese artificial-intelligence upstart has shot to prominence after saying it had trained high-performing AI models cheaply, without the most advanced chips.

US President Donald Trump said Monday the low-cost Chinese AI model DeepSeek was a “wake up call” for US firms, after its emergence caused a rout in tech shares. “Hopefully, the release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win,