A small lab in China has shaken Silicon Valley. The sudden appearance of an advanced AI assistant from DeepSeek, a previously little-known company in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, has sparked discussion and debate within the U.

Fears that the AI gold rush could be under threat rocked Wall Street on Monday following the emergence of a ChatGPT-like model from China, triggering predictions of turmoil for Silicon Valley and accusations of cheating.

Since Chinese AI company DeepSeek released an open version of its reasoning model R1 at the beginning of this week, many in the tech industry have been