The top market regulator in China has fined several firms for impersonating ChatGPT and DeepSeek services. The fine comes as Beijing tightens oversight in the country’s artificial intelligence sector.
The State Administration for Market Regulation said Friday it punished several companies for unfair competition, falsely imitating and advertising AI services from other brands. One of the fined companies is Shanghai Shangyun Internet Technology, which was found running a sham ChatGPT service through Tencent’s WeChat platform. The regulator fined the company 62,692.70 yuan, equivalent to about $9,034.
China fines firms impersonating ChatGPT and DeepSeek
According to the agency, the service had been advertising itself as the “official Chinese version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT,” and charged users for AI conversations, a conduct that breached the country’s Anti-Unfair Competition Law. “The company was fully aware of the industry status and influence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. They deliberately created a false impression that they are providing the official service to mislead users into making purchases,” it said during a press briefing on Friday.
According to the AI Market Regulation government arm, a wave of DeepSeek mini-programmes and websites imitating the original platform appeared in early 2025. The watchdog penalized the services for trademark violations and for trying to deceive the public through falsified promotional language. “This investigation served as a deterrent to illegal operators … and guided the AI market towards a standardised and orderly path of development,” the agency said.
Another firm, Hangzhou Boheng Culture Media, was fined 30,000 yuan for running an unauthorized website that allegedly offered “DeepSeek local deployment.” The regulator said the site copied fonts, icons, and layout from DeepSeek’s official platform and tricked users into paying for the service.
In the regulator’s campaign roundup, an engineer was slapped with a 360,000 yuan penalty for illegally accessing company servers that held confidential code and algorithm data. Furthermore, a Shanghai firm received a 200,000 yuan penalty for building AI phone-call software used by loan agencies to carry out scams.
A Beijing-based company was also fined 5,000 yuan for “freeriding” on DeepSeek’s name to promote its own local deployment software. China’s innovation regulators have been trying to balance out the growth of AI companies and fair competition in a market where developers are aggressively competing to topple American entities. Just over a year ago, DeepSeek became the talk of the globe after it launched a chatbot with lower user fees and development costs compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
