Italy’s data protection authority has blocked use of Chinese tech startup DeepSeek’s AI application to protect Italians’ data and announced an investigation into the companies behind the chatbot.

Italy's data protection authority said on Thursday it had blocked Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek over a lack of information on its use of personal data. DeepSeek could not be accessed on Wednesday in Apple or Google app stores in Italy,

The country’s data watchdog says the firm gave it ‘completely insufficient’ answers to questions about what it does with user information.