BEIJING — Local governments in China have urged officials to use DeepSeek's artificial intelligence (AI) model to help them make decisions.
Senior figures in several cities have recently given their staff instructions about the use of the technology.
These include Zhengzhou, capital of the central province of Henan, where the city's Communist Party chief An Wei urged senior city officials to "deeply study and master the use of AI models such as DeepSeek, and make full use of AI to support decision-making, analysis and problem-solving", according to the city's official newspaper.
The local political research department has also distributed a training manual to its cadres that said AI could help the department act as "an adviser and assistant to serve the scientific decision-making of the municipal party committee", according to the Shanghai-based media outlet ThePaper.cn.
Elsewhere, cadres in Laibin, in the southern region of Guangxi, were told on Tuesday they should "proactively embrace and learn new technologies" and "apply artificial intelligence to assist in decision-making, analysis and problem-solving", official media reported.
On the same day, the party newspaper in Foshan, a city in neighbouring Guangdong province, said DeepSeek could "provide intelligent support for government decision-making" after it was integrated into the local online government service system.
It is the first time that officials have been urged to use a specific model when making decisions, but there have been other attempts to employ AI technology at a local level.
A document jointly issued by several central government departments last year suggested using the technology in "smart cities" - a concept promoted by President Xi Jinping.
Several other city governments in China have launched online services using DeepSeek, and officials are exploring other potential uses.
Meanwhile, several universities introduced DeepSeek's R1 model into their teaching systems after the start of the spring semester.
On Monday, DeepSeek's founder, Liang Wenfeng, was among the leading entrepreneurs invited to meet Xi at an event designed to signal Beijing's support for the private sector, particularly the tech industry.
DeepSeek, based in the eastern city of Hangzhou, has stunned Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the global tech industry in recent months by releasing two groundbreaking AI models - the V3 large-scale language model and the R1 inference model.
These models perform on par with leading chatbots developed by US tech giants such as OpenAI and Google but are significantly cheaper to train.
However, DeepSeek's growing popularity has sparked censorship concerns. Government departments in several countries, including the United States, Italy, Australia and South Korea, have been banned from using it. In South Korea it has also been removed from app stores.
