The AI large model integration application platform Poe recently released its 2025 AI Spring Model Usage Trends report, showing that in the face of emerging competitors, the usage rate of the DeepSeek R1, which was hotly discussed in China earlier this year, has dropped from a peak of 7% in February to 3% by the end of April.
Hong Kong’s “Economic Daily” and other Hong Kong media quoted Poe’s report on May 15.
The startup company DeepSeek, headquartered in Hangzhou, China, released the open-source inference model R1 in January this year. At that time, the official propaganda widely praised this domestic AI model DeepSeek, claiming it surpassed OpenAI and others.
As users and investigators in various countries conducted more in-depth investigations into DeepSeek, it was found that it was not as wonderful as initially promoted, with many security hazards and vulnerabilities. Governments of several countries such as Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the United States, Canada, Italy, Australia, the Netherlands, and hundreds of companies have banned the use of DeepSeek on government agencies and company devices.
At the Baidu AI Developers Conference on April 25, Baidu’s Chairman Robin Li stated that DeepSeek can only handle single text and cannot understand multimedia content such as audio, images, and videos. He emphasized that its major issue is being slow and expensive, with a high “hallucination rate” which makes it not reliable to use in many situations.
Robin Li emphasized the practicality and implementation of technology. He believes that without applications, both chips and models have no value. One of the major obstacles for current developers in AI application development is the high cost of large models that are not affordable.
In March this year, “Lucheng Technology,” an AI Infra company from the Tsinghua camp that was the first to access the DeepSeek model and provide API and cloud mirror services to users, announced the suspension of related services.
Lucheng Technology founder You Yang revealed in a post that the actual cost of DeepSeek is much higher than the theoretical cost. He once publicly questioned why DeepSeek cannot operate without any American technology in the short term, “Why can’t they tell the truth?”
According to a report by Sina Technology on March 4, at 5:02pm on March 1, DeepSeek announced an online system theoretical cost-profit margin of 545%. Subsequently, Lucheng Technology published a statement through official channels stating, “We will cease providing DeepSeek API services in one week, please use up your balance as soon as possible.”
The report stated that Lucheng Technology has not publicly disclosed the reason for ceasing the provision of DeepSeek API services. However, based on a significant amount of rational cost analysis of DeepSeek content published by its founder You Yang on platforms such as Zhihu, it can be inferred that cost is the key factor in their decision to stop providing DeepSeek API services.
The connection between DeepSeek and the Chinese government may be more direct than people imagine. Canadian cybersecurity company Feroot Security found a high correlation between DeepSeek’s website login page and the US-sanctioned Chinese state-owned company, China Mobile.
In recent months, due to national security considerations, the international community’s calls to ban DeepSeek continue to escalate.
On April 16, the US House of Representatives released a report through a special committee on the Chinese Communist Party, emphasizing that DeepSeek poses a serious threat to US national security. The report accuses DeepSeek of collecting user data for the Chinese government and secretly manipulating outcomes, becoming the latest tool used by the CCP to embellish its image, monitor foreign citizens, and steal and undermine US export control restrictions.
On April 24, several members of the US House of Representatives sent a letter to the Chinese artificial intelligence company “DeepSeek,” expressing concerns about the company’s CCP background and requesting the data used to train AI models in the US.
Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Brett Guthrie and Chairman of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Gus Bilirakis, along with 10 members of the subcommittee, wrote to DeepSeek expressing concerns about the company’s “collection of personal information of US users” and the national security risks it poses.