The US business said on Wednesday that it has made DeepSeek’s R1 artificial intelligence model, created by the Chinese startup, available on its Azure cloud computing platform and GitHub developer tool.

The AI model will join the more than 1,800 models that Microsoft now offers in the model portfolio on both platforms.

Battle for AI Supremacy: DeepSeek and ChatGPT

DeepSeek released a free AI helper last week that it says uses less data and costs a small fraction of what other providers charge. Tech stock investors became alarmed when the assistant overtook US competitor ChatGPT in terms of downloads from Apple’s App Store on Monday.

Microsoft is making this move in an effort to lessen its dependency on OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT. The business has been striving to improve its flagship AI product, Microsoft 365 Copilot, by integrating both internal and external AI models, according to a Reuters article from last month. Additionally, Microsoft announced that users will soon be able to run the R1 model locally on their Copilot+ PCs, which may allay worries about data sharing and privacy related to the model’s use.

DeepSeek has admitted that company keeps user data on Chinese servers, which could prevent the US from adopting it.

According to a Tuesday Bloomberg News story, Microsoft and OpenAI are looking into whether data produced by OpenAI’s technology was accessed without permission by a party associated with DeepSeek.

Competitors have responded to DeepSeek’s quick rise in the AI industry. On Tuesday, OpenAI introduced a customized version of ChatGPT for US federal organizations after CEO Sam Altman said the business would “bring forward some releases.”

Alibaba, a Chinese company, also released an upgraded Qwen 2.5 AI model on Wednesday.