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The Delhi High Court observed on Wednesday that artificial intelligence is a “dangerous tool” in anybody’s hand, whether Chinese or American. The court’s observation came while it was hearing a petition seeking a direction to the Centre to block access to DeepSeek, an AI chatbot developed by Chinese entities, in all forms in India.
“AI is a dangerous tool in anybody’s hand, whether it is Chinese or American, it does not make any difference. It is not that the government is unaware of these things. They are very well aware…,” a bench of Chief Justice D K Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela said.
The Centre’s counsel submitted that the issue requires consideration and urged the court to grant some time to get instructions in the matter.
The court listed the matter for February 20 to enable the Centre’s counsel to get complete instructions.
The petitioner’s counsel urged the court to issue notices to authorities in the matter and said it pertains to a direct infringement of the right to privacy.
To this, Justice Gedela said, “You are in the dark web 97%. What are you saying? You are next generation youngsters. You know about it more than us. You think this data, any data is safe? Are you aware of the dark web? Are you aware that 97% of the iceberg is tilted around? Are you aware of that? So therefore, they are saying consideration. We are giving them an opportunity, please wait.”
Petitioner Bhavna Sharma, a lawyer, said the plea seeks to protect the personal data of citizens as well as the data in government systems and devices from cyber attacks and data breaches, and uphold the confidentiality of government data and documents.
The plea said within a month of the DeepSeek application’s launch on play stores, various vulnerabilities were discovered in it, causing a large-scale leak of sensitive personal data online, including chat history, back-end data and log streams.
