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A rather alarming new report from financial services company Ramp shows DeepSeek catching on with US firms looking for cheaper alternatives to Anthropic and OpenAI. In its June 2026 series covering all of last month, the Chinese AI company ranked first among SaaS vendors for breakout growth relative to size across Ramp customers.
Needless to say, the security implications here are quite alarming.
DeepSeek, the China-based ChatGPT and Claude competitor, burst onto the scene last January, enjoying a fair amount of hype and causing the equivalent of an AI red scare in Silicon Valley. Both the hype and fear have since cooled, arguably once users clocked how heavily the Chinese government was censoring certain prompts.
While we should still be concerned about it ranking fairly high among iPhone users on the US App Store, there’s now a real worry about US companies using it after this recent report.
Ramp’s own data had DeepSeek climbing to 0.3% business adoption in January before falling back to 0.1%. Now it was one of the fastest rises last month. I suspect we could soon get an updated figure. Ramp economist Ara Kharazian, who tracks this for a living, said he didn’t expect American firms to touch DeepSeek at all.
This isn’t companies quietly running the open-weight models on their own hardware either. In that case, data theoretically would never leave the building. According to Ramp, firms are paying DeepSeek directly and routing data straight through it.
Everything typed into a hosted model goes over the internet to the provider. Any prompts, documents, source code, customer records dropped in for a quick summary, etc. OpenAI and Anthropic operate on US infrastructure under contracts and laws that companies can actually enforce, or at least have a better chance of doing so.
DeepSeek is a way different story, and you don’t have to take my word for it.
“To provide you with our services, we directly collect, process, and store your Personal Data in the People’s Republic of China,” its own terms of service states. PRC law requires companies to cooperate with state intelligence requests, without the warrant or the court process you would get in the US.
So any American firm routing internal data through DeepSeek should treat that data as reachable by a foreign government. And it would be crazy to think a company could file any sort of appeal.
Overall, DeepSeek might have a cheaper per-token rate, sure. But anything employees feed into it is the real cost, something China likely understands full well.
Ramp didn’t provide any information on which size companies are adopting DeepSeek, let alone a list of exact names. Ramp’s platform is used by businesses ranging from small 1-person shops to Fortune 100 companies. I suspect the culprits lie more on the lower end in terms of headcount.
This is the first report I’ve seen on DeepSeek gaining traction among US firms as a cheaper alternative to the bigwigs. I’ll definitely continue to keep an eye on this.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.
Security Bite is 9to5Mac’s weekly deep dive into the world of Apple security. Each week, Arin Waichulis unpacks new threats, privacy tips and concerns, vulnerabilities, and more, shaping an ecosystem of over 2 billion devices.
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