Amazon employees are warning customers about DeepSeek privacy concerns — and pushing Amazon’s own AI instead

• Amazon quickly integrated DeepSeek AI models into Bedrock due to high demand in January.
• Amazon wants to promote its products as faster and more secure alternatives to DeepSeek.
• The cloud giant warns employees not to share confidential information with DeepSeek.

In late January, as DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the tech industry, Amazon saw a huge spike in companies requesting access to the Chinese AI model on its development tool Bedrock.

Amazon swiftly added DeepSeek to Bedrock. Some employees who spoke to Business Insider felt the approval process was unusually fast. Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy later told investors the company moved quickly to meet customer demand.

DeepSeek’s sudden rise has spurred swift reactions inside Amazon. The repercussions have been felt across product updates, sales pitches, and development efforts, according to internal documents seen by BI and people familiar with the matter.

The responses show how fast-moving AI discoveries can whipsaw even the biggest and smartest technology companies. Amazon rivals, including OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have also been forced to respond to the DeepSeek impact.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company’s strategy has always focused on providing secure access to the latest models through AWS, giving customers control over their data to customize and build generative AI applications.

“Delivering DeepSeek models is an example of that,” the spokesperson added in a statement to BI. “We’re extremely pleased with the feedback that we’ve received from the thousands of customers who have already deployed DeepSeek on AWS.”

‘Privacy concerns’

DeepSeek’s AI models upended the tech world in January with their powerful performance and low cost. Tech stocks plunged as investors questioned US tech companies’ massive spending on computing products.

For now, Amazon continues to add DeepSeek-related features. Earlier this week, the cloud giant made it easier to use DeepSeek’s reasoning model on Bedrock, offering a “fully managed” service with built-in security and monitoring features. Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman wrote on LinkedIn that there’s been “incredible demand” for DeepSeek.

It’s not just the Bedrock team scurrying to make changes. One person said that DeepSeek has sparked many new discussions across Amazon.

One particular topic has been how Amazon should position itself against DeepSeek.

AWS has encouraged employees to highlight privacy and security concerns around DeepSeek when they speak to customers, according to internal guidelines seen by BI. They should remind customers of the importance of “model choice” and pitch AWS’s Nova AI models as an alternative, the document added.

The guidelines also suggest promoting Bedrock, which AWS says provides a more secure and private method of accessing AI models. With Bedrock, customer data is not shared with model providers or used to improve base models. Amazon expects most customers to use open-source versions of DeepSeek models, not those directly offered by the Chinese company, it added.

“DeepSeek’s privacy policy states they collect user data and may store them on servers in China,” the guidelines said. “We are aware of the privacy concerns on DeepSeek models.”

Nova is faster and safer

AWS has also told employees to leverage DeepSeek’s shortcomings when selling Nova.

The guidelines say Nova models are faster than DeepSeek’s models, based on third-party benchmark data, and more secure given AWS’s more robust “responsible AI” standards.

Nova is more comparable to DeepSeek’s V3 model than the R1 reasoning model and they serve different needs, the guideline also stated. However, the V3 is a “text-only model,” while Nova supports image and video understanding, the document emphasized.

AWS is now working on its own reasoning model that would directly compete with DeepSeek’s R1, BI previously reported. While AWS has been developing the new model for months, DeepSeek’s recent emergence added more pressure to expedite its progress, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

Efforts to study DeepSeek’s technology are in the works at Amazon, and AWS wants to apply some of the training techniques DeepSeek used in its new reasoning model, some of the people added.

During last month’s earnings call, Jassy said Amazon was “impressed” with a lot of DeepSeek’s training methodologies. Those include “flipping the sequencing of reinforcement training” and some of its “inference optimizations,” Jassy explained.

“For those of us who are building frontier models, we’re all working on the same types of things and we’re all learning from one another. I think you have seen and will continue to see a lot of leapfrogging between us,” he said.

‘Deepseek-interest’ channel

On the day DeepSeek roiled the stock market in late January, Amazon employees created an internal Slack channel called “Deepseek-interest,” according to a screenshot seen by BI. More than 1,300 employees joined the channel in just a few days.

One person wrote on this Slack channel that he was “surprised” there wasn’t much pushback against DeepSeek given its China origin and “security concerns.” Another person asked for Neuron, AWS’s in-house chip development platform, to support DeepSeek models. A third person wrote about a customer complaint over errors they saw while using DeepSeek on Bedrock.

Amazon also held an internal DeepSeek learning session in late January, according to one of the Slack messages. The event covered AWS’s messaging, positioning, and key differentiators versus DeepSeek.

Moving on from DeepSeek

Meanwhile, Amazon now discourages employees from using DeepSeek on their work computers, according to several people familiar with the matter. Staff now get a warning to not share confidential information with DeepSeek’s app, the same message they see when using ChatGPT at work.

Perhaps in a sign of how fast things change in AI, some Amazon employees already seem to be moving on from DeepSeek to other Chinese AI offerings.

One person wrote in the internal Slack channel that AWS should start considering other China-based models, like Alibaba’s Qwen.

“DeepSeek is already the past day,” this person wrote. “When do we have Qwen2.5-Max?”

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