DeepSeek’s deal with Italian regulators will see it launch the first country-specific version of its chatbot, involving additional warnings over “hallucinations”, or false outputs, and technical changes, the company and regulators said.
The Chinese AI start-up, which came to worldwide prominence a year ago, agreed to commitments with the Italian competition authority, the AGCM, following months of negotiations and a ban over user data concerns earlier in 2025.
False outputs
The AGCM had accused DeepSeek of failing to sufficiently warn users of hallucinations.
It said it ended its investigation into DeepSeek last week after the company committed to “making its disclosures about the risk of hallucinations more transparent, intelligible and immediate”.
The regulator said DeepSeek also committed to lowering the hallucination rate of its models through technical fixes, which the AGCM called “commendable”.
But it added that the start-up “has stated that the phenomenon of AI model hallucinations is a global challenge that cannot be entirely eliminated”.
According to the regulator’s notice, DeepSeek submitted proposed remedies on 15 September, 22 September and 21 November, including warnings about hallucinations and information about terms and conditions in Italian that had previously only been available in Chinese and English.
When an Italian IP address is detected, or a prompt is written in Italian, the warnings will now be delivered in that language.
More detailed warning
An Italian warning message about hallucinations that is longer than the English-language version has already been implemented on the Italian version of DeepSeek’s online chatbot, local Chinese media reported.
DeepSeek also said it would organise workshops for staff members to ensure that the relevant business units had “full awareness” of Italian consumer law.
The start-up is to deliver a progress report to the AGCM within 120 days, and the regulator said if the required changes aren’t made in that period, the probe could be reopened and a fine of up to €10 million (£8.7m) could be levied.
