Amid intensifying competition in artificial intelligence between the United States and China, the emergence of the DeepSeek-R1 model has created significant ripples across the technology sector, capital markets, and policy circles. This presentation analyses the legal and policy landscape surrounding DeepSeek, drawing upon its key technical features—including reinforcement learning, a mixture-of-experts architecture, a multi-head latent attention mechanism, knowledge distillation, and an open-source approach.

Firstly, DeepSeek’s success raises critical questions about the efficacy of the United States’ increasingly stringent export control measures on chips and semiconductors—components essential for training large language models. Secondly, much like Chinese technology giants such as TikTok and Huawei, DeepSeek has come under information security scrutiny in the United States and other jurisdictions. Thirdly, despite its domain-specific capabilities and competitive API pricing, DeepSeek has faced criticism for generating outputs laden with political and ideological biases, thereby igniting debates over free speech and censorship. Furthermore, this presentation examines intellectual property and contractual concerns stemming from the knowledge distillation technique employed by DeepSeek. In conclusion, the presenters are of the view that geopolitical considerations will continue to exert a profound influence on the legal challenges and possible solutions related to the DeepSeek models.

About the Speakers:

Prof. Jyh-An Lee is Professor and the founding Executive Director of the Centre for Legal Innovation and Digital Society (CLINDS) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. He has been featured on ABC News, BBC News, Bloomberg News, Financial Times, Fortune, and South China Morning Post as an expert on intellectual property and technology law. Professor’s works have been cited by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the UK High Court of Justice, the US Copyright Office, the US Patent and Trademark Office, the US International Trade Commission, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and the WTO dispute-settlement panel.

Ms. Xuan Sun is a PhD candidate at CUHK LAW.

*The Law Society of Hong Kong has awarded this seminar 1 Continuing Professional Development (CPD) point.

Register here to attend the seminar on or before 14 January 2026, 12:30pm (Hong Kong Time).