Iran says Israel and America would be “crazy” to attack its nuclear facilities, adding it would spell a “very bad disaster” for the region.

The warning came in the first interview to be given by Iran’s foreign minister since its arch nemesis Donald Trump’s inauguration.

In an exclusive interview with Sky News in the Iranian capital, Abbas Araghchi also mocked the US president for proposing a “clean out” of Palestinians from Gaza. Iran’s top diplomat suggested instead that Israelis be sent to Greenland.

Mr Araghchi invited Sky News to Iran’s foreign ministry for the interview, taking the opportunity to address talk of Israel attacking Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme with US backing.

“We have made it clear,” he said, “that any attack to our nuclear facilities would be faced with an immediate and decisive response. But I don’t think they will do that crazy thing. This is really crazy. And this would turn the whole region into a very bad disaster.”

In his first term in office, Mr Trump reneged on America’s support for an internationally negotiated deal over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme, which saw uranium enrichment limited in return for sanctions being lifted.

Iran insists its nuclear programme is for civilian and peaceful purposes. However, since Mr Trump went back on the deal, Iran has returned to enriching uranium to levels that have no purpose other than building a nuclear weapon, say Western governments.

Mr Trump has hinted he would prefer a diplomatic solution, saying a new deal with Iran would be “nice”.

But Mr Araghchi said although he was prepared to listen to President Trump, it would take a lot more than that for Iran to be convinced it should begin negotiations with the US towards another deal, given what happened with the first.

“The situation is different and much more difficult than the previous time,” he said. “Lots of things should be done by the other side to buy our confidence… We haven’t heard anything but the ‘nice’ word, and this is obviously not enough.”

‘Take them to Greenland’

The foreign minister was also dismissive of Mr Trump’s latest comments about the Middle East. The re-elected president’s proposal that Gaza is cleaned out of Palestinians has prompted outrage across the region.

Mr Araghchi mocked the idea with one of his own: “My suggestion is something else. Instead of Palestinians, try to expel Israelis, take them to Greenland so they can kill two birds with one stone.”

Iran’s allies ‘are rebuilding themselves’

In his short term in office, Mr Araghchi has seen allies and friends assassinated and toppled from power.

He conceded Iran’s allies have been weakened, saying: “Hamas and Hezbollah have been damaged. But at the same time, they are rebuilding themselves, because as I said, this is a school of thought, this is an idea, this is a cause, this is an ideal that will always be there.”

Iranians hope deal could be done with West

Iranians we spoke to on the streets of Tehran said they hoped a deal could be done with the West if it could lead to a lifting of sanctions and an improvement in Iran’s dire economic fortunes.

Some estimates place inflation at 50%, while youth unemployment is near 20% and the currency is at an all-time low.

Trust between Iran and America is also at rock bottom levels. Making progress towards any agreement and lifting sanctions will be enormously challenging.

Donald Trump thinks the Chinese startup DeepSeek, which claims it has a technical advantage over US rivals, should be “a wakeup call” for American AI firms.

DeepSeek says its artificial intelligence models are comparable with those from US giants, like OpenAI which is behind ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, but potentially a fraction of the cost.

That has triggered a fall in various US shares, especially chipmaker Nvidia which registered a record one-day loss for any company on Wall Street.

But the US president believes the success of the Chinese firm could be helpful to America’s AI aspirations.

“The release of DeepSeek, AI from a Chinese company should be a wakeup call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win,” Mr Trump said in Florida.

He pointed to DeepSeek’s ability to use fewer computing resources. “I view that as a positive, as an asset… you won’t be spending as much, and you’ll get the same result, hopefully,” he added.

On Monday, the DeepSeek assistant had surpassed ChatGPT in downloads from Apple’s app store.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has given his rival some acknowledgement in a post on X, reacting to DeepSeek’s R1 “reasoning” model – a core part of the AI technology which answers questions.

“DeepSeek’s r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price,” he wrote.

But Mr Altman was also defiant: “We will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases.”

There have been concerns DeepSeek could undermine the potentially $500bn (£401bn) AI investment by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank in Stargate which Mr Trump announced last week at the White House.

That project essentially aims to build vastly more computing power to boost AI development.

But while addressing Republicans in Miami on Monday, Mr Trump remained upbeat. He claimed that Chinese leaders had told him the US had the most brilliant scientists in the world.

👉 Follow Trump 100 on your podcast app 👈

Read more:
AI now a contest between superpowers
PM: AI changing ‘quicker than we think’

He indicated that if Chinese industry could come up with cheaper AI technology, US companies would follow.

“We always have the ideas. We’re always first. So I would say that’s a positive that could be very much a positive development.

“So instead of spending billions and billions, you’ll spend less, and you’ll come up with, hopefully, the same solution,” Mr Trump said.

The intense attention on the Chinese firm has not all been good news though. It reported suffering “large-scale malicious attacks” on its services.

The company said it was hit by a cyber attack on Monday which disrupted users’ ability to register on the site.

The arrival of a previously little-known Chinese tech company has attracted global attention as it sent shockwaves through Wall Street with a new AI chatbot.

On Monday, DeepSeek, a tiny company which reportedly employs no more than 200 people, caused American chipmaker Nvidia to have almost $600bn wiped off its market value – the biggest drop in US stock market history.

The Chinese AI chatbot threatens the billions of dollars invested in AI while causing US tech stocks to lose well over $1trn (£802bn) in value, according to market analysts.

DeepSeek, which has developed two models, V3 and R1, is now the most popular free application on Apple’s App Store across the US and UK.

What’s DeepSeek?

The startup was founded in 2023 in Hangzhou, China, by Liang Wenfeng, who previously co-founded one of China’s top hedge funds, High-Flyer.

The fund had by 2022 amassed a cluster of 10,000 of California-based Nvidia’s high-performance A100 graphics processor chips that are used to build and run AI systems, according to a post that summer on Chinese social media platform WeChat.

Former US President Joe Biden’s administration restricted sales of those chips to China soon after, something likely to be pursued by his successor, Donald Trump, who was recently sworn in for a second term in the White House.

Why all the attention now?

The hype – and market turmoil – over DeepSeek follows a research paper published last week about the R1 model, which showed advanced “reasoning” skills.

They include the ability to rethink its approach to a math problem while, depending on the task, being 20 to 50 times cheaper to use than OpenAI’s o1 model, according to a post on DeepSeek’s official WeChat account.

That’s why there are fears it could undermine the potentially $500bn AI investment by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank that Mr Trump has touted.

What’s so cool about it?

As Morgan Brown, vice president of product and growth in artificial intelligence at Dropbox, put it, it is currently “insanely expensive” to train top AI models.

“DeepSeek just showed up and said ‘LOL what if we did this for $5M instead?’

“And they didn’t just talk – they actually DID it. Their models match or beat GPT-4 and Claude on many tasks. The AI world is (as my teenagers say) shook,” he said in a post on X.

So how much did it cost?

The company wrote in a paper last month that the training of DeepSeek-V3 required less than $6m (£5m) worth of computing power from Nvidia H800 chips.

How has President Trump responded?

Speaking to House Republicans on Monday, the 78-year-old Republican called the development a “wakeup call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win”.

But Mr Trump signed an order on his first day in office last week that said his administration would “identify and eliminate loopholes in existing export controls”, signalling that he is likely to strengthen Mr Biden’s approach.

Read more from Sky News:
What are the ‘UFO clouds’ seen hanging over UK skies?
What are the UK’s knife crime laws?

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who has advised Mr Trump on tech policy, has warned overregulation of the AI industry by the US government will hinder American companies and enable China to get ahead.

“Deepseek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” said Mr Andreessen in a recent post on X, referencing the 1957 satellite launch that set off a Cold War space exploration race between the Soviet Union and the US.

What are the concerns?

Some people expressed their reservations about the Chinese company and its handling of users’ data.

Too controversial?

People have also been flagging how, when it comes to questions about alleged wrongdoing and human rights abuses at the hands of the Chinese government, the app seems unable to respond.

Seemingly controversial topics include Taiwan, which China claims as its own, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre as well as China’s treatment of its Uyghur population, which the UN has previously said “may constitute crimes against humanity”.