Sault Ste. Marie city council agreed this week to ban use of the popular DeepSeek app on city-issued smartphones and tablets.
DeepSeek is a free AI-powered chatbot that works much like ChatGPT, which was released in the United States in November 2022.
Released in January of this year, DeepSeek within weeks passed ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app on the iOS App Store in the United States.
"DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that has developed a Generative AI (Gen-AI) chatbot that produces content such as text, audio, code, videos, and images," said Frank Coccimiglio, the city's manager of information technology.
"This content is produced based on information the user inputs, called a 'prompt,' typically a short instructional text. AI systems can often access large datasets which can include sensitive or personal information. Unauthorized access to these datasets can lead to breaches of privacy," Coccimiglio added in a report prepared for this week's meeting of city council.
"Due to privacy concerns identified by Shared Services Canada and other federal agencies regarding the inappropriate collection and retention of sensitive private information, and that Chinese national security laws compel DeepSeek to provide such data to the state, DeepSeek AI poses a security risk that the city needs to address."
In addition to banning DeepSeek from city-issued smartphones and tablets, Coccimiglio says the city is developing an artificial intelligence usage policy outlining principles and guidelines for ethical, responsible, and transparent use of AI.
The city's information technology staff "will lead a one-year pilot project implementing GovAI technology. This technology provides a unique interface that wraps around the underlying Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Large Language Model (LLM) with a compliance and safety layer and provides deep government contextual knowledge to help city staff," he added.