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Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a tech tool owned by a foreign adversary is thrusting its tentacles into the devices in tens of millions of Americans’ pockets, giving its owners the chance to harvest vast amounts of data about them while shaping how they interpret the world around them, either real or imagined. Pretty bold, huh?

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That was, in essence, why the U.S. Supreme Court just this month unanimously upheld a law effectively banning TikTok—because Congress saw it as a national security risk that stood to benefit China. Given the challenges coming from Beijing, justices said Washington was within its power to deny it one of its strongest toeholds out of concern that it could be used to surveil Americans, steal their secrets, and feed them a stream of propaganda useful to China’s big-picture goals. (For its part, the China-based parent company ByteDance has rejected U.S. fears about nefarious uses for its TikTok.) So Congress told tech companies like Apple and Google they would run afoul of U.S. law if they kept providing Americans’ access to the app and its updates if TikTok remained under Chinese ownership.

Yet TikTok is still available in the U.S. in some sort of Kafkaesque legal limbo because President Trump refuses to enforce the law on the books. That unusual situation is about to get more complicated, now that a second app that poses a similar threat to U.S. security interests this week hit the top of Apple’s downloads. DeepSeek, a challenger to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, sure seems to pose a lot of the same threats that national security hawks have argued a Chinese-owned platform for viral videos does. Unlike TikTok, DeepSeek is pretty upfront that it’s sending users’ data to servers in China. So it’ll be heading toward the same fate as TikTok, right?

Forgive me while I suppress this chuckle.

The joke, of course, is that much of Washington started this week waiting to see if the new President would glower at the hot new app from China. Equally as plausible, Trump could be convinced that DeepSeek was a welcome addition to the app stores that came to market on his watch. After all, he praised its blockbuster debut as a “positive” development when he met with House Republicans on Monday.

Maybe a wait-and-see pose is the sage new default from Congress, K Street, the think-tank universe, and the corporate headquarters’ policy shops. It’s like the off-color joke at a dinner party; no one wants to be the first to smirk or to scold, especially when someone as mercurial asTrump is the lone arbiter.

Remember: TikTok started off a subject of Trump’s ire, with him calling for its ban during his first stay in the White House. But when he realized it could be used to offset Facebook, which he blamed for his 2020 loss, he switched his footing in the most predictable of ways. It wasn’t that the tech giants were recklessly spreading disinformation, it was that they were potentially favoring liberal disinformation over the MAGA-ified kind.

In his telling, Trump “saved” TikTok for its 170 million users in the United States last week with an order that it be given a 75-day reprieve from the divestment law while it considers a sale to a non-Chinese holder. Legal experts say this is probably outside of Trump’s power but not beyond his ability—at least for a while—given that his administration can choose which laws get priority enforcement and which might slide a beat. 

The DeepSeek example is less clear as to how much Trump might be able to puff up his chest—either in embracing it or expelling it. Trump has already made a grand show of his interest in America dominating China in the A.I. space. He used his first full day back in the White House to showcase a joint venture featuring OpenAI that could invest up to $500 billion on building power plants and data centers needed to fuel the fast-growing artificial intelligence footprint.

That confidence proved way off the mark. Days later, DeepSeek was getting global attention for a product that rivals widely available offerings from Google and OpenAI, and they threw it together faster than their rivals and on the cheap with open-source coding. 

The sudden surge for DeepSeek similarly caught Trump as surprised, although the President’s first comments about it on Monday carried their typical non-specific nature. “The release of DeepSeek A.I. from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing,” Trump said.

“I’ve been reading about China and some of the companies in China, one in particular coming up with a faster method of A.I. and much less expensive method, and that’s good because you don’t have to spend as much money,” he also said.

Others in his party were more direct about their concerns in a way that echoed those made much of last year about TikTok. 

“DeepSeek—a new A.I model controlled by the Chinese Communist Party—openly erases the CCP’s history of atrocities and oppression,” said Rep. John Moolenaar, the Michigan Republican who leads the House’s China panel. “The U.S. cannot allow CCP models such as DeepSeek to risk our national security and leverage our technology to advance their A.I. ambitions.”

But many of the efforts to surpass Chinese advances on A.I. date to a Biden-era sanctions regime that sought to keep China lagging by restricting access to U.S.-made semiconductor chips that were seen as necessary for any real advances. That hurdle forced Chinese engineers like those at DeepSeek to find workarounds, and they did so in ways that are leaving U.S. tech wonks both impressed and nervous.

The rise of DeepSeek and its potential to upend long-held assumptions about others’ A.I. capacities—and costs, both fiscal and geopolitical—sent markets spiraling as the week began. Chip maker Nvidia lost $600 billion of its market value. Early trading Tuesday showed the tech giants rebounding slightly.  If China could do this without vaunted Nvidia chips, maybe investors put too much faith in that firm. (The company counters that DeepSeek still required their chips, which it had hoarded before the new rules snapped into place.)

Other firms with big footprints in D.C. and ambitions in Silicon Valley for their own A.I. systems were similarly watching to see what this means for their products. The likes of Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI’s patron Microsoft all are left wondering if the ground beneath them has shifted for a technology that might define the next economy.

Beyond Wall Street, the development drew fresh questions for the wonks in Washington about the American supremacy on machine learning, risks to privacy, and the very premise of truth. As with TikTok, there is a huge potential audience that derives its content consumption—some would mistake it for news—through the filter of a Chinese algorithm. And it is coming about by Americans acting on their own without any real foreign coercion.

Like TikTok, DeepSeek seems to have built in a censorship trigger to block criticism of China and its government. “Let’s talk about something else,” DeepSeek’s chatbot said when asked to describe the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Similarly, it carried the Chinese government’s positions on Taiwan, Tibet, and the South China Sea. It’s not that far off from what Republicans are trying to accomplish in whitewashing the violence on Jan. 6, 2021.

On the most basic level, the quandary comes down to this: is there anything to be done if Americans voluntarily engage with a foreign-owned tech platform that can skew perceptions in ways that may well end up being simultaneously counter to facts and self-interest? And if the man in the Oval Office is the enabler of such apps and instructs the Attorney General to ignore a law the Supreme Court upheld just this month, is there anything to be done?

So—and, again, stop me if you’ve heard this one—Republicans in Washington who profess to be hawks on a rising China are going to sit back and take the cues from Trump, at least for the moment. The ban on TikTok is one he sought and is now ignoring. Trump’s whims stand to supersede the decades of calculus that have defined the last two true superpowers. It did not take a clever chatbot to come up with this absurdist set-up.

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