Chinese startup DeepSeek AI and its open-source language models took over the news cycle this week. Besides being comparable to models like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s o1, the models have raised several concerns about data privacy, security, and Chinese-government-enforced censorship within their training. 

AI search platform Perplexity and AI assistant You.com have found a way around that.

On Monday, Perplexity posted on X that it now hosts DeepSeek R1. The free plan gives users three Pro-level queries per day, which you could use with R1, but you’ll need the $20 per month Pro plan to access it more than that. 

In another post, the company confirmed that it hosts DeepSeek “in US/EU data centers – your data never leaves Western servers,” assuring users that their data would be safe if using the open-source models on Perplexity. 

“None of your data goes to China,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas reiterated in a LinkedIn post. 

DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by both its V3 and R1 models, is accessible via browser or app — but those require communication with the company’s China-based servers, which creates a security risk. Users who download R1 and run it locally on their devices will avoid that issue, but still run into censorship of certain topics determined by the Chinese government, as it’s built in by default. 

As part of offering R1, Perplexity claimed it removed at least some of the censorship built into the model. Srinivas posted a screenshot on X of query results that acknowledge the president of Taiwan. 

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Source : https://www.zdnet.com/article/perplexity-lets-you-try-deepseek-r1-without-the-security-risk/