Export controls need to be tightened after revelations the Chinese company used Nvidia technology, the leaders of a congressional committee said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Two members of U.S. Congress are calling on President Donald Trump's administration to consider restricting the export of artificial intelligence chips made by Nvidia, alleging Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has relied on them.

DeepSeek’s AI models reportedly rival OpenAI’s for a fraction of the cost and compute.

DeepSeek stunned the tech world with the release of its R1 "reasoning" model, matching or exceeding OpenAI's reasoning model for a fraction of the cost.

Officials in the White House and FBI have begun a probe into DeepSeek to determine whether banned NVIDIA chips were used to create the R1 model.

American AI stocks got sucker punched after China's DeepSeek app reportedly showed advancements against rivals sending investors into sell mode, shaving 3% off the Nasdaq.

US officials are deep into an investigation to find out if Chinese AI startup DeepSeek found a backdoor route to Nvidia’s high-end chips through Singapore, evading American export bans.

DeepSeek claims it costs them less than $6 million to train its latest AI models, while it costs ChatGPT $100 million. DeepSeek is able to charge only $0.14 per 1 million input tokens, compared to $15 at OpenAI. Token input pricing has to do with the amount of text that goes into training the AI language models.

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.

Nvidia said in a statement it is "ready to work with the administration as it pursues its own approach to AI."