South Korea's industry ministry has temporarily blocked employee access to Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek due to security concerns, a ministry official said on Wednesday, as the government urges caution on generative AI services.

South Korea's industry ministry has temporarily banned employee access to Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek due to security concerns, a ministry official said on Wednesday, as the government urges caution on generative AI services.

The defence and trade ministries cited concerns over data privacy following similar moves by Italy and Australia.

The flood of AI news from Google comes in the wake of the launch of DeepSeek, the breakthrough Chinese AI tool that's been making headlines.

Google has launched several new AI models, including Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental, and brought a 'reasoning' model to its Gemini app.

Google has now given its Gemini app access to a new AI model called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental. According to the announcement blog post, the company says this model is currently “ranked as the world’s best model” and is available at no cost.

DeepSeek recent explosion in popularity continues to be a problem for the AI startup. In a notification spotted by Bloomberg, the company said it was temporarily limiting access to its application programming interface service in response to a shortage of server capacity.

DeepSeek, the Chinese startup whose artificial-intelligence model roiled global markets last week, said it would restrict access to its application programming interface service because of shortages with its server capacity.

DeepSeek AI is restricting access to its application programming due to an overwhelming response from the market which is constraining its capacity. The Chinese start-up rattled markets across the globe with the release of it models in January which resulted in investors selling off tech stock due to fears that the emergence of low-cost Chinese