The U.S. Commerce Department is looking into whether DeepSeek - the Chinese company whose AI model's performance rocked the tech world - has been using U.S. chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China,

Organised AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of countries including Malaysia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, the source said. The Commerce Department and DeepSeek did not immediately return requests for comment.

US officials are probing whether Chinese AI startup DeepSeek bought advanced Nvidia Corp. semiconductors through third parties in Singapore, circumventing US restrictions on sales of chips used for artificial intelligence tasks,

DeepSeek is just one of many Chinese companies working on AI to make China the world leader in the field by 2030.

DeepSeek built top-performing AI models using less-advanced chips at what it says is a fraction of the cost of rivals such as OpenAI.

OpenAI has accused Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek of using its proprietary models to train an open-source competitor.