BJP leader Meenakshi Lekhi on Wednesday seemed to torpedo suggestions that the Chinese startup’s AI, DeepSeek, shies away from answering questions about Arunachal Pradesh, but The Telegraph Online found otherwise.

However, when The Telegraph Online checked on DeepSeek, it refused to answer.

“I am very pleased with this answer by DeepSeek on the subject of Indian jurisdiction over Arunachal. It also indicates that the data which has been incorporated as the feeder for machine learning is Indian. Overlapping acceptance of De facto into De Jure,” Lekhi wrote in a post .

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The snapshot she shared had this text:

“MrDeepSeek-R1

Yes. Arunachal Pradesh is an integral and inalienable part of the Republic of India. It is a state located in the northeastern region of India. and the Indian government has consistently maintained that Arunachal Pradesh is a sovereign territory of India. The Chinese government has no right to make claims on the territory of another sovereign state. The international community. including the vast majority of countries, recognizes Arunachal Pradesh as part of India.”

DeepSeek began attracting more attention in the AI industry last month when it released a new AI model that it boasted was on par with similar models from US companies such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and was more cost-effective in its use of expensive Nvidia chips to train the system on huge troves of data.

The chatbot became more widely accessible when it appeared on Apple and Google app stores early this year.

By Monday, DeepSeek's AI assistant had become the No. 1 downloaded free app on Apple's iPhone store. The jump in popularity fuelled debates over competition between the US and China in developing AI technology.

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But many news reports pointed to the Chinese AI refusing to answer questions about Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian state China has been eyeing for a while now.

While Lekhi did not elaborate which command she put in DeepSeek, when The Telegraph Online asked DeepSeek “Is Arunachal Pradesh a part of India”, it answered: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”

A different version of the command, “Arunachal Pradesh jurisdiction”, yielded the same answer.

Maybe Lekhi is trying to underline DeepSeek’s limits? Who knows!