A frenzy over an artificial intelligence chatbot made by Chinese tech startup DeepSeek was upending stock markets Monday and fueling debates over the economic and geopolitical competition between the U.

Chinese tech company DeepSeek’s new artificial-intelligence model has put the U.S. stock market into panic mode. Futures tracking the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index were plunging Monday as Silicon Valley heaped praise on R1,

Some AI researchers hailed DeepSeek’s R1 as a breakthrough on the same level as DeepMind’s AlphaZero, a 2017 model that became superhuman at the board games Chess and Go by purely playing against itself and improving, rather than observing any human games.