Trump’s AI czar flags report questioning DeepSeek’s cost of developing AI models

President Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence (AI) czar, David Sacks, is pointing to evidence that China’s DeepSeek AI startup spent a lot more money developing its models than has been reported.

DeepSeek sent the U.S tech sector into turmoil on Monday after reporting that it had spent only $5.567 million to train its DeepSeek-V3 AI model, which is purportedly competitive with some AI models developed in the United States that cost b