Italy’s Antitrust and Consumer Protection Authority (AGCM) announced on Monday the opening of an official investigation into DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, citing concerns over the dissemination of potentially false or misleading content generated by its AI systems. The probe focuses on consumer protection violations, particularly the company’s failure to explicitly warn users about the risk of so-called AI hallucinations—a term used to describe fabricated or inaccurate outputs produced by large language models.