Silicon Valley and Washington leaders said the app shows China can challenge the U.S. The Nasdaq lost 3 percent and chipmaker Nvidia shed $589 billion in market capitalization.

An AI-powered chatbot by the Chinese company DeepSeek has quickly become the most downloaded free app on Apple's store, following its January release in the US. The app's sudden popularity, as well as DeepSeek's reportedly low costs compared to those of US-based AI companies, have thrown financial markets into a spin.

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Chinese startup DeepSeek's AI Assistant on Monday overtook rival ChatGPT to become the top-rated free application available on Apple's App Store in the United States. Powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model,

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI chatbot reportedly made at a fraction of the cost of its rivals, launched last week but has already become the the most downloaded free app in the US. AI chipmaker Nvidia and other tech firms connected to AI,

(Reuters) -Chinese startup DeepSeek said on Monday it will temporarily limit registrations due to a cyberattack after the company's AI assistant amassed sudden popularity. The startup earlier in the day was also hit by outages on its website after its AI assistant became the top-rated free application available on Apple's App Store in the United States.

DeepSeek topped the Apple App Store chart and sparked fears the Chinese company was quickly catching up with OpenAI's ChatGPT while costing far less.

DeepSeek researchers previously claimed they spent about $6 million to develop an earlier AI model, using approximately 2,000 H800 Nvidia chips – hardware with lower data transf