New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Wednesday (February 12) observed that artificial intelligence (AI) is a dangerous tool in anybody’s hand, whether it is Chinese or American.
A division bench comprising Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela observed this while hearing a plea seeking a direction to the Centre to block access to DeepSeek, which is an AI chatbot developed by Chinese entities, in all forms in India.
What did the High Court say?
“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…,” the bench said, news agency PTI reported.
What did the petitioner submit?
Petition has been filed by Bhavna Sharma, a lawyer, and the petitioner said that it seeks to protect the personal data of citizens, the data in government systems as well as devices from cyber attacks and data breaches, and uphold the confidentiality of government data and documents.
The counsel representing the petitioner, while saying that the matter pertains to a direct infringement of the right to privacy, urged the court to issue notices to the authorities concerned in the matter.
Centre’s counsel sought time to get complete instructions on the matter
The counsel representing the Centre submitted before the court that the issue requires consideration and urged the bench to grant some time to get instructions in the matter.
The bench agreed to grant time and listed the plea for February 20 to enable the counsel representing the Centre to get complete instructions on the matter.
The plea has said that within a month of launch of the DeepSeek application on play stores, various vulnerabilities were discovered in the application, causing a large-scale leak of sensitive personal data online, including chat history, back-end data and log streams.
