SAN FRANCISCO — When local cybersecurity start-up DepthFirst sought artificial intelligence software to help hunt computer bugs, it turned to a Chinese company, not the top U.S. AI labs in its hometown.
American AI firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI restrict their chatbots, Claude and ChatGPT, respectively, from helping with cybersecurity tasks for all but certain, vetted users. Their leading Chinese rivals, however, such as DeepSeek and Z.ai, allow anyone to download and modify their AI models for nothing.
