U.S. officials are looking at the national security implications of the Chinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday, while President Donald Trump's crypto czar said it was possible that intellectual property theft could have been at play.

President Biden and his team saw China as the one nation with the intent and capability to displace American primacy — and crafted policies to defend U.S. power.

White House and European regulators are separately investigating DeepSeek over national security risks, data privacy concerns, and potential IP violations.

Top White House advisers this week expressed alarm that China's DeepSeek may have benefited from a method that allegedly piggybacks off the advances of U.S. rivals called "distillation."

Deepseek collects similar data to American-based AI models, but Chinese laws could make that data more accessible to the government.