​​​​​​WASHINGTON

US President Donald Trump's commerce secretary nominee said Wednesday that Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot DeepSeek misused American technology.

"They stole things, they broke in. They've taken our IP.

"It's got to end, and I'm going to be rigorous in our pursuit of restrictions and enforcing those restrictions to keep us in the lead, because we must stay in the lead," Howard Lutnick said at his Senate confirmation hearing.

"The Chinese use our patent office against us. They use our laws," he said. "We need to stop it, we need to end it.”

The US is "successful" on the internet and created the "greatest technology" companies in the world, said Lutnick, adding it needs to do the same thing with AI.

"We need to make sure we set standards that the world meets," he said.

"And I think that's the way we'll keep our lead. Do it the American way, which we know is the winning way, our allies know is the winning way, and we need to set those standards," he added.

Allies 'have taken advantage' of US

Lutnick also said South Korea and Japan "have taken advantage of our good nature and called them to bring their production to the US."

"Our great allies have taken advantage of our good nature, and they like steel in Japan and appliances in Korea. I mean, they've just taken advantage of us. It's time for them to partner with us and bring that production back home," Lutnick said.

"So, I think we're going to work closely with our allies to increase their manufacturing productivity at home, and I think your way of thinking about it saying let's work together to do that and bring it home," he said. "I think it's really important for us, and really important for our workforce".

DeepSeek, a large language model (LLM), operates with significantly lower resource consumption than its rivals, including US-based OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Its rapid rise in popularity across global mobile app stores triggered stock losses for major Western tech firms such as Nvidia.