There are EU/US providers offering Deepseek/Qwen/Kimi/etc.-as-a-Service. With zero ties of their infrastructure to China.

Fully compatible with the well known Antrophic API.

You only have to replace the URL and your key.

Based on what the political climate looks like nowadays it's entirely possible the US bans federal contractors from associating with any company that uses the models themselves, regardless of data provenance or where they are hosted. Or they create AI safety rules that make it impossible to release open source models (for example, making it so that closed-source models can be evaluated with a harness but open-source models need to pass the benchmark with the weights alone, which isn't really possible). Or they just declare Chinese models a security risk like TikTok (claiming that the model would be trained to respect Chinese interests).

It may not be likely but it's definitely possible enough to be something people worry about.

Yeah, but ask them about Tiananmen square.

Then run the DeepSeek or Qwen model on AWS GovCloud, etc., and you won't have any risk of exposure to "China".

I'm not even sure what "EU AI safety rules" are. Can't people in the EU just use whatever they want?

Running on AWS GovCloud isn't necessarily an option, some places prohibit running Chinese origin models even locally.