HONG KONG – A new report highlights how DeepSeek, the Chinese tech startup, is making significant strides in the AI landscape, particularly in developing nations. This progress hints at a potential narrowing of the artificial intelligence adoption gap between these regions and more advanced economies, as it emerges as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The report, released on Thursday by researchers from Microsoft, reveals that global adoption of generative AI tools increased to 16.3% of the world’s population in the three months leading to December, marking an uptick from 15.1% in the preceding quarter. This growth, however, is not evenly spread across the globe.

Despite this overall increase, the report points out a growing disparity between AI adoption rates in developed versus developing countries. Advanced economies are seeing their AI adoption rates accelerate at nearly twice the pace compared to their developing counterparts.

“We are noticing a division, and there is concern that this gap will continue to expand,” commented Juan Lavista Ferres, chief data scientist for Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab. The lab utilized anonymized telemetry data to monitor global device usage patterns.

The report identifies that countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, France, and Spain are leading in AI adoption due to their early and sustained investments in digital infrastructure and AI technologies. These findings echo a Pew Research Center survey from October that assessed global attitudes towards AI, highlighting countries more enthusiastic than apprehensive about AI adoption. South Korea, in particular, is noted for its strong embrace of AI in both reports.

Microsoft has a vested interest in AI adoption — its business and much of the tech industry and stock market is staking its future on AI tools becoming more widely used and profitable — but Lavista Ferres said his lab is looking more broadly at the topic.

His researchers found that the rise of Chinese startup DeepSeek, which was founded in 2023, has fueled wider AI adoption across the developing world given its free and “open source” models – with key components available for anyone to access and modify.

When DeepSeek released its advanced reasoning AI model called R1 in January 2025, which it said was more cost-effective than OpenAI’s similar model, it raised eyebrows in the global technology industry and many were surprised by how China is catching up with the U.S. in technological advancements. Leading science journal Nature published peer-reviewed research co-authored by DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng in September, describing it as a “landmark paper” from the Chinese startup.

Lavista Ferres said DeepSeek is a “good model” for tasks like math or coding, but it operates differently from U.S.-based models on topics like politics.

“We have observed that for certain type of questions, of course, they follow the same type of access to the internet that China has,” he said. “Which means that there will be questions that will be answered very differently, particularly political questions. In many ways that can have an influence on the world.”

DeepSeek offers a free‑to‑use chatbot on web and mobile, and has also given developers global access to modify and build on its core engine. Its lack of subscription fees has “lowered the barrier for millions of users, especially in price‑sensitive regions,” Microsoft’s report said.

DeepSeek didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

“This combination of openness and affordability allowed DeepSeek to gain traction in markets underserved by Western AI platforms,” the report added. “DeepSeek’s rise shows that global AI adoption is shaped as much by access and availability as by model quality.”

Developed countries including Australia, Germany and the U.S. have sought to limit the use of DeepSeek over alleged security risks. Microsoft last year banned its own employees from using DeepSeek. Adoption of DeepSeek remained low in North America and Europe, the report found, but it surged in its home country China, as well as Russia, Iran, Cuba, Belarus – places where U.S. services face restrictions or where foreign tech access is limited.

In many places, DeepSeek’s prevalence correlated with it being a default chatbot on widely available phones made by Chinese tech companies like Huawei.

DeepSeek’s market share in China was 89%, the report estimated. That’s followed by Belarus’s 56% and Cuba’s 49%, both of which also had low AI adoption more broadly. In Russia, its market share was around 43%.

In Syria and Iran, DeepSeek’s market share reached around 23% and 25%, respectively, the report added. In many African countries including Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Niger, DeepSeek’s market share was between 11% to 14%.

“Open‑source AI can function as a geopolitical instrument, extending Chinese influence in areas where Western platforms cannot easily operate,” the report said.

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O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.