New legislation would punish with 20 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

A Republican member of the U.S. Senate has proposed a radical measure to counter the use of the Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek, a competitor to the American analogue ChatGPT that has lately gained significant attention worldwide.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced a bill last week that could make it illegal to use DeepSeek in the United States. Anyone importing AI-related technology or intellectual property from China could face up to 20 years in prison, with fines of up to $1 million for individuals and $100 million for companies.

Such extreme measures may doom the bill’s chances of becoming law — it was tabled last week, which often signals legislative stagnation. However, its introduction underscores growing concerns among lawmakers over DeepSeek’s rapid rise and the massive market selloff it triggered.

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Congress is scrambling to limit China’s influence in the AI sector, with lawmakers from both parties, including Hawley and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), criticizing the Biden administration for not acting sooner.

They argue that delayed restrictions on AI chip exports to China, which began in 2022, have put the U.S. at risk.

DeepSeek has demonstrated that AI models can match the performance of OpenAI’s best chatbots while using far fewer resources, raising concerns that Wall Street may have overvalued U.S. tech giants. The resulting competition wiped out over $1 trillion in market value, leaving American companies exposed.

On the other side, AI researchers noted that DeepSeek has failed most security checks in experiments and was actually trained on ChatGPT. Even if it doesn’t have any major advantages over other AI programs, low costs and rapid deployment make DeepSeek a threat for American tech moguls.

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This is one of the reasons U.S. politicians want to limit or prohibit entirely the export of key AI chips from companies like Nvidia to China.

Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, by the way, met with President Donald Trump days after the California-based chipmaker had suffered the largest single-day loss of any company in history - $1 trillion or 17% of its stock value.

Prohibiting DeepSeek outright may prove difficult, given the ongoing struggles to implement the TikTok ban.

Before assuming a seat in the Senate in 2019, Hawley had served as the attorney-general of Missouri, where he investigated Google and Facebook over data protection and trust breaches. 

A Trump loyalist, he voted to acquit the president during the impeachment trial in 2020. 

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