One of Germany’s data protection watchdogs on Friday said DeepSeek’s app illegally sends user data to China and asked Google and Apple to consider blocking the artificial intelligence service.

Berlin’s data protection commissioner Meike Kamp said in a statement that DeepSeek’s transfer of German user data to China is “unlawful.”

There is not a readily available way to get in touch with DeepSeek. CNBC has reached out to DeepSeek’s privacy team.

Chinese firm DeepSeek made waves this year when it launched an AI model that it claimed was created at a fraction of the cost of competitors, using less advanced Nvidia chips.

The company also has its own global chatbot AI app, which has been downloaded millions of times, garnering scrutiny.

If the German case against DeepSeek progresses, it could lead to a European Union-wide ban for the app, some experts say.

“It is certainly possible that this incident could lead to an EU-wide ban because the rules that apply in Germany are the same elsewhere in the EU and also in the UK,” Matt Holman, specialist AI and data lawyer at Cripps, told CNBC by email. There are a few steps before this would become reality, however.

This is not DeepSeek’s first run-in with regulators in Europe. Italian data protection authorities in February ordered DeepSeek to block its app in the country. Meanwhile, Irish authorities in January asked DeepSeek for information on its data processing.

A SpaceX crane collapse at the company’s Starbase, Texas facility on Tuesday has prompted an investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency told CNBC in an email.

The crane collapse was captured in a livestream by Lab Padre on YouTube, a SpaceX-focused channel. Clips from Lab Padre were widely shared on social media, including on X, which is owned by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether any SpaceX workers were injured as a result of the incident. Musk and other company executives didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for OSHA told CNBC that more details will be available after the investigation is complete.

SpaceX has a history of workplace injuries that exceed industry average, Reuters previously reported. In 2014, one of the company’s employees, Simon LeBlanc, died on the job due to what OSHA concluded was a failure by the company to protect him from a clear hazard.

Earlier this year, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a Musk-led effort by the Trump administration to slash the size of the federal government, cut OSHA’s resources and shuttered at least 11 of its field offices. Through DOGE, Musk sought to reduce federal agency budgets, personnel and even certain regulations, limiting their ability to investigate and enforce existing laws.

The SpaceX crane collapse followed a string of explosions and other setbacks for the company’s Starship Super Heavy launch vehicle, the largest rocket ever flown, which is key to Musk’s ambition to transport equipment and people to Mars.

Environmental activists in the U.S. and Mexico say those explosions have harmed sensitive habitat, wildlife and marine life. SpaceX said, in posts online, that its activity had not harmed the surrounding area during the most recent explosion on June 18.

Starship was previously expected to play an important part in NASA’s effort to return to the moon. SpaceX had earned more than $20 billion in federal government contracts mostly from the Department of Defense and NASA.

Meanwhile, NASA’s proposed lean budget for the next year has not yet been authorized by Congress and could impact the agency’s business with SpaceX, and shift the focus of its missions.

Musk, who was President Donald Trump’s biggest financial backer, sought to appoint his friend Jared Issacman, a commercial astronaut, to lead NASA under the second Trump administration. Trump withdrew his nomination of Isaacman as the president bickered with Musk in the waning days of the billionaire’s formal involvement with the White House.

WATCH: SpaceX valuation may be conservative, investor says.

After a brief pullback this week, shares of stablecoin issuer and recent IPO darling Circle were in rally mode again, soaring double-digits on a percentage basis during trading on Thursday and ending the day up close to 8%, after having moved up by more than 600% percent since its debut on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month.  

Bitcoin and ether have led a recent crypto rise, as digital assets joined the resumption of the risk-on rally, with additional factors such as the potential for lower interest rates later this year, some more moderate talk from the White House on tariffs, and at least temporary easing of tensions in the Middle East.

But when it comes to Circle and the stablecoin boom, there’s a more fundamental driver as Wall Street interest in the technology continues to evolve, and more ties are built between the old rails of the financial world and the new digital assets infrastructure.

Fiserv debuted a stablecoin earlier this week. Mastercard then linked that stablecoin to its network.

Credit cards are a good place to understand the opportunity, according to Zach Abrams, Bridge co-founder and CEO, who told CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos that the market is estimated to grow into the trillions and could be the biggest global money-moving shift since the introduction of credit cards.

Some of the top private companies are already making major use of stablecoins today. Abrams cited the example of ScaleAI, into which Meta just invested over $14 billion, and which uses Bridge to pay data labelers all over the world. SpaceX also uses Bridge to convert payments made for its Starlink internet services in local currencies and bring the money back to the U.S.

“We think that stablecoins are an entirely new money-movement platform, like credit cards were decades ago,” Abrams said in an interview for Thursday’s “Crypto World.”

“[Credit cards] created trillions in value and I think stablecoins will be the same,” he said. “We think it’s going to be a very big change that will play out over many years,” he added.

Bridge was recently acquired by private fintech giant Stripe for $1.1 billion.

Abrams said as regulatory clarity increases, more traditional financial players will want to get in on the opportunity. Stablecoins, less than a decade old, are today a $400 billion market, and Abrams says that if, as most banks think, the market “will get to a few trillion” it is a market where peeling off some of that share has to be a focus.

Today, it is served almost entirely by Tether and Circle, he said. Ultimately, there is a role not just for big financial firms like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, but Fiserv and local banks. In fact, the move up to trillions in stablecoin market value won’t happen, Abrams said, without “a huge percentage” being handled by traditional financial institutions.

Wall street’s embrace of tokenization keeps growing in other ways as well. New York-based investment startup Republic announced this week it will allow users to buy tokens that represent private companies like SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. Republic will offer these tokens for a minimum of $50, lower than the roughly $10,000 typically required for investing in private companies. 

You can watch the full interview with Abrams above in Thursday’s “Crypto World.”

In other crypto news of note on Thursday:

Ripple and the SEC can’t put their legal battle behind them, yet.

A federal judge rejected the joint motion by the crypto firm and the regulator to endorse Ripple’s reduced $50 million fine to settle the civil lawsuit over the alleged sale of unregistered securities, saying they lacked the authority to make the deal. Ripple-linked cryptocurrency XRP was down over 2% on Thursday. Ripple’s chief legal officer Stu Alderoty laid out the company’s options in an X post.

Also, more from “Crypto World” on the news that first broke yesterday that the Trump administration is working to let home buyers include their crypto in federal mortgage applications.