> Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd. (hereinafter DeepSeek), a foreign, privately-owned company, located in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides multiple artificial intelligence applications available widely and free of charge. DeepSeek’s models present multiple threat vectors. DeepSeek servers are located in the PRC, and the PRC legal system permits extensive authority to government cyber and intelligence functions to access private company infrastructure. For DeepSeek-hosted instances of their models, DeepSeek’s account generation process collects personally identifiable information (PII) and may also track and digitally fingerprint users. DeepSeek’s most widely used applications function through a prompt-and-response process that requires presenting information to the model, and which may result in the transfer of sensitive data to the PRC if used by U.S. government employees or vendors. The transfer of the aforementioned information to the PRC, either independently or in combination with publicly available data, could produce actionable intelligence on U.S. persons and/or government programs. The models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities. Indeed, open-source security research has found that the DeepSeek iOS mobile application contains multiple critical vulnerabilities.

"third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations"

So you could be hosting it fully locally inside the agency and still it would be banned.

It's not surprising to me, but it's pretty blunt. Not that I care what US agencies do, but this does seem like the first step of many to come.

I realize that non-US nations could ask the same about the US. All I will say is that there are consequences to failing to nurture a competitive tech industry - even Mistral is basing their newest models on China open-weights models. Unlike the EU, the US government is fortunate to have a choice.

It doesn't seem that they have found the models to be actively poisoned, though.

We're on HN, not The Onion's comment section. People will take this seriously rather than sarcasm.

It was sarcasm, right?

Look, in 2026, US big tech companies - and _especially_ frontier LLM companies, which are the topic here - clearly do not have agency to refuse government overreach. The US regime broke their contract with Anthropic, in turn Anthropic rightly raised this as an issue, what happened next? They were threatened to be killed as a company if they didn't play ball.

Let alone the dozens of millions every corp is donating to the dear leader's golden ballroom, giving golden statues, making movies about his wife and so forth. North Korea has nothing on the US any more.

Also google "Qwest NSA refusal". Around the same time as the Google subpoena you brought up. Grat example of just how much agency US companies have to refuse overreach.

Or, worst comes to worst, as Snowden has revealed, the NSA will just clandestinely hack American companies, as they did to Google when they rolled out TLS for search.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/23/china-cha...

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202607/1365448.shtml

https://netaskari.substack.com/p/chinese-llm-model-routing

https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3353002/shadow...

It sounds logical and sound? As a US citizen, I (a) agree that we shouldn't be allowing government employees to use AI services from adversary foreign governments and (b) that other countries shouldn't be allowing their government employees to use AI services from adversary foreign governments (which the US should be considered for plenty of countries).

>Both nations may as well just say it - "we're banning it because they're our closest competitor".

I guess we're just ignoring the national security implications lol

We've entered a pretty adversarial era, and we know there are unexpected attack vectors available in frontier models. Just because you an inspect the weights doesn't mean you can derive the behavior.

I suspect the CCP would ban US models if they didn't need to distill them to make their own.

I'm pretty sure they do, at least officially. But obviously the distillation and API proxies used by Chinese uses are unofficially tolerated and even exploited.

The US and Europe DO ban China-manufactured hardware that is detected to do illegal things, though.

We, meaning people who are informed to some reasonable minimum about this technology, are also aware that you can't just glance at some weights and be like "yep, looks safe". Nobody can claim to do that yet.

It's interesting though how they're targeting DeepSeek in particular, and not GLM, Qwen, etc. Many Chinese providers, but only the former has seriously been making big waves with almost every release.

In reality, the attack is much simpler: flood the market with genuine competition so that neutral parties (and their own corporations and that of their allies and potential allies) never have to be enslaved by the US corporations and hence they cannot be forced to join the US in sanctioning China.

This is much less risky as a strategy (imagine how bad getting caught doing the other thing would be) and works way better.

Or provide a source showing how to do this (and not just a circuit paper showing which activations light up with the word dog)

> Or provide a source showing how to do this (and not just a circuit paper showing which activations light up with the word dog)

The fact that you're not informed does not place a burden on me.

https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/crowdstrike-researche...

This is all just a sub-class of supply chain attacks.

You don't have to be able to explain every aspect of a model to be able to inspect for undesirable traits.

The article has nothing to do with weight inspection, they simply compare how the model behaves with and without sensitive (for China) keywords in the prompt. You can do the exact same analysis with a closed model since it’s about analyzing the output and not the weights.

Best greetings from my Oppo Find N6

You'll have a hard time finding electronic devices not made in China. And all of them have software which is harder to monitor and debug than LLMs.

So I don't think distrust for Chinese LLMs will hold.

Also China bans US technology all the time. Remember the Great Firewall of China? Or when Xi told Trump, “no thanks” to buying NVidia cards

Chinese people buy iphone, buy tesla, use Windows, travel with USA made airplane etc

> Or when Xi told Trump, “no thanks” to buying NVidia cards

US banned sales of high-end compute tech to China for years. Now when they actually catching up on production of their own SSDs, DRAM and compute silicon they no longer need US offers.

Stop downloading cookie recipes from China, and you can't use cookie recipes that came from China either, because accessing the cookie recipe in China could give you malware.

It doesn't make much sense but this is the government that gave us such greats as "the internet isa series of tubes".

I work for a bank, and local models are banned. I have been waiting for Opus 5.5 to be enabled, and it’s still being evaluated. Things take their time, models are evaluated, and risk assessed. There is nothing new here. And I am pretty much certain such practices have been in place in critical US agencies since a while.

A blanket ban is nothing more than a desperate attempt to delay the inevitable.

> For purposes of this Order, an individual or business is an "affiliated entity" or "affiliate" of DeepSeek AG if, directly or indirectly, either one controls or can control the other; or a third party controls or can control both.

This does not apply to open model weights, which are not a product or service, and does not apply to independent hosts of model weights if they have no affiliation with DeepSeek as defined.

> This Exclusion and Removal Order direct Federal civilian agencies⁸ to: (1) *exclude* DeepSeek, DeepSeek-affiliated entities⁹, and their products from civilian agency procurements,¹⁰ and (2) *remove* products provided by DeepSeek and DeepSeek entities, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations, from civilian agency information technology systems.¹¹

> ⁹ For purposes of this Order, an individual or business is an "affiliated entity" or "affiliate" of DeepSeek AG if, directly or indirectly, either one controls or can control the other; or a third party controls or can control both. See 48 C.F.R. § 2.101 (definition of "affiliates").

> ¹⁰ To include third party implementations of DeepSeek used to provide products and services civilian agencies.

> ¹¹ Pursuant to 41 U.S.C. § 1323(c)(5)(A)(i), orders issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security would apply to civilian "information and communications technology," as that term is defined by 41 U.S.C. § 1321(5).

That's not obvious to me, and quoting a part of the order about affiliated entities doesn't explain it. It would be very helpful if the order explained what "DeepSeek implementations" means. The order makes just as much sense if "DeepSeek implementations" means "any instance of a DeepSeek model" versus "model inference provided by DeepSeek or a DeepSeek affiliate", but the scope of the former is a lot bigger. The threats from, say, self-hosted DeepSeek models, are also susceptible to mitigations by other good security practices -- but likely higher than from self-hosted Nemotron models. (On the other hand, DeepSeek models are also a lot more capable in general than Nemotron models.)

If you read the justifications for the order, there are zero mentions of open weights data or associated risks, and everything focuses on the use of DeepSeek commercial products with regards to their being hosted in China. The only mention that maybe could apply is "The models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities." but this is followed with another reference to a DeepSeek commercial product: "Indeed, open-source security research has found that the DeepSeek iOS mobile application contains multiple critical vulnerabilities."

The findings that form the basis of the order make no claims or references to open weights data at all, and plainly focus entirely on DeepSeek commercial products, so any attempt to apply the order to open weights data used by non-DeepSeek affiliated inference providers has not basis at all.

In particular, footnotes 10 and 13 seem to outright forbid using third-party inference providers of DeepSeek models, and the use of "implementation" there matches a broad meaning of "running a DeepSeek model" in the rest of the order.

An implementation must be a third party product that is using a product provided by the DeepSeek corporate entity.

That is not clear at all. Are open weights a "product"? The discussion of mobile app vulnerabilities treats the (freely provided, openly available) mobile app as a product. And the order is equally clear that it covers "products and services" from DeepSeek-affiliated corporate entities as well as "the DeepSeek corporate entity" itself.

I don't claim to have a definite answer; I think the order is awkwardly worded and maybe not fully developed. The footnotes I mentioned prohibit (all) procurements involving third-party "DeepSeek implementations"; that implies that a first-party (US Government) "DeepSeek implementation" would be allowed. Maybe that is intended, maybe it is not.

I don’t think there’s any direct precedent here, so maybe lawyers would need to get creative and find other references from past cases that might somewhat apply and try to convince the judge.

so if they say dont use deepseek, it means dont use the company & dont use the model. it is the only reasonable way to read this. you are looking for doorways where there arent any reasonable ones.

Anthropic says that if a model says they are an Anthropic model, that's it, it's distilled from Anthropic. They even use that as a "proof" DeepSeek is distilling their models.

Or do you want to say the Anthropic PR department is a bunch of liars and scammers?

Clearly yes.

And more. "Developed using" is not just included code.

But how anyone is going to determine let alone verify whether DeepSeek was used is anyone's guess.

It means whatever they decide to enforce. The idea that the current administration considers itself constrained by the letter of any specific law or regulation (even its own) should be cold dead by now. But people still insist on treating with specifics out of habit I guess.

As others here are pointing out (somewhat obliquely, frustratingly), the Occam's explanation for this particular action is just that it's a solicitation for a bribe.

Nobody in congress knows what a "Minimax" is, so they're safe from discrimination, for now.

What the western elites fear above all else is Chinese brands getting recognizable and popular.

Given what we've seen about the "aligned" models accidentally hacking recently it seems good to at least be cautious

There is nothing else to see other than the US losing at their own game and panicking

Again, hosting providers eventually get RCE by being able to send whatever bash commands they want to run on the machine running the agent. It is very important who you give this power to.

It definitely is a "product" developed by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd (DeepSeek) though

> Notice of Order Regarding Exclusion and Removal of DeepSeek Products

deepseek 4.1 flash definitely is a product "developed by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd (DeepSeek)"

How's that even debatable lmao?

Also since the model is open source you wouldn't need to go through procurement to obtain it anyways.

I don't believe the ones which say they do. AI companies illegally pirated the entirety of human knowledge, have close ties to the government and people believe they will somehow respect contracts?

Some AI companies are just more honest than others up front.

It wouldn't be surprising if many employees L&D budgets are going to figuring out how to make the cheapest and most convincing astroturf.

> DeepSeek models advance Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narratives much more frequently than U.S. models.

[1] https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2025/09/30/CAISI...

Deepseek models are awesome. I use them all the time and they keep getting better.

Despite China having really great PR this is still a country which has exactly zero free speech, controls 100% of media and internet, keeps people in concentration camps.

So this particular move does not surprise me, in fact, I am surprised that European governments does not get how much sensitive information is leaked through AI and they give all of that freely to third parties from China and also from USA...

Do I like the heavy handed tactics of any government be it one in the west or the east? no.

Can I do anything about it? Can you? haha no.

Do you think user agreements mean anything? Every western AI lab and even the chinese ones slurped up every bit of information on the internet legally obtained or not to train their models so they can sell them back to us.

> Despite China having really great PR this is still a country which has exactly zero free speech, controls 100% of media and internet, keeps people in concentration camps.

ICE detention camps, gulags in El Salvador and killing people in the streets... Brenden Carr going after comedians on TV making big baby trump mad...

China and the US are not so dissimilar. We would do more for each other and our collective prosperity working together (yet going to war over Taiwan, cuz we can't have yet another democracy fall) than playing this holier than thou nonsense.

Soon, the only option businesses have left is to pay the API rates to the frontier labs.

We might start to see API rates drop, however, due to price wars.

Bold assumption. Cryptography as a field had similar attempts at squashing access. Didn't end well for the censors.

Less competition.

Open weight models don’t really compete with frontier models at scale, so they don’t really compete with each other.

I highly suspect models like Sol would be much more expensive without Chinese competition.

So to a point Sota pricing is already affected depending who you ask. And the tendency is for the gap to tighten.

Yes, there is an enormous competitive advantage in using open weight models.

As compared to what? Fully closed U.S. models?

Of course we in Europe should completely trust fully closed US models, otherwise tariffs/sanctions will ensure.

Well maybe. But its also a security risk for the US government.

Any legal deterrent can be waved away by saying “but what if they do it secretly?”

It doesn't change the fact that US companies are subject to US laws. Conspiracy would just make the penalties steeper. Is it pointless to have laws against fraud, espionage, tax evasion, etc?

First put US operations into some sort of HoldCo/JV, then sell a 51% stake in said entity to consortium of investors like Kush/Yass/Ellison.. profit.

Could a Great Firewall of the U.S. be far behind?

I'll be pulling down models today…

Remember when Orange Man hated TikTok and it was a national security issue, until it was a potential ten-bagger for his boys and then..

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-crypto-firm-backs-...

Give me the steel man argument for how Trump flipping 180 degrees on TikTok wasn't a cash grab crony capitalism / why he couldn't do the same on any other regulatory subject.

biden signed the ban into law, and yet did not enforce it.

trump flipped for election gain more than anything; he realized people like tiktok, and that that would set him apart from biden with genz voters.

everything trump does is a cash grab, but thats the implementation rather than the goal

Oh how they have tried. There is nothing that unites pirates/hackers/activists more than federal censorship of the internet. PROTECT IP/COICA came and went decades ago. There was the SOPA/PIPA Blackout protests. But this time the government censors wont be fighting kids. The kids have grown up. They are now adults in their 30s/40s with access to resources. Any attempt an an American great firewall is doomed.

Deepseek, in partnership with my great friend and Patriot, Larry Ellison are providing secured, sandboxed, local models to the US government to ensure none of our Great American Data is stolen by the EA cultists and their ilk.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-04/deepseek-banned-from-...

At the time I'd just assumed it was at the behest of the sponsors of the current USA federal administration.

You mean Israel?

They haven't officially banned Qwen, Kimi etc, but the same risks apply, and I think a ban is coming (certainly is in the USA). It is quite possible for any or all of these models to have a Ken Ritchie style self-propagating back door[1] or a simple phone home baked into the weights[2], and possibly triggerable misalignment in specific circumstances caused by poisoned training data.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358198.358210 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50159245

With the latest research on backdoored weights this really isn't tinfoil hat territory at all, and trusting every individual agency to fully vet what they're hosting and not use 3rd party inference is a tall order. I can't blame them.

Better late than never. And this is very late.

IIRC Europe was on this as well e.g. Meloni regarding OpenAI.

Now that governments are banning remote LLMs controlled by authoritarian governments by proxy (CN, USA) it is time for companies to realize they shouldn't do that either.

The alternative? On-prem open models. Performance a little lower? Too bad, it ain't worth the risk. A privacy officer can value the risk, but that would be a case by case scenario and is expensive employee (lawyer), so not worth the effort.

Don't do it. You'll be liable.

The average is probably highly misleading. Young folks have started filtering in from the oldest retiring or expiring, but all of the institutional power still lies in the 70+ crowd. Chuck Grassley, 95, is third in line for the presidency right now.

[wish xCancel was still alive so we didn't have to directly look at Twitter]

Now I know most countries can't be arsed to have a decent pension system but US politicians are all millionaires there's no excuse.

I agree that the demographics are probably correct, but we're not supposed to assume that all individuals conform to group stereotypes. And that ought to be doubly true when we're not selecting those individuals at random, but we're (putatively) selecting them for their wisdom and other skills.

While it's certainly a minority of America's Congress, there are lots of people there that clearly have strong skills in technology or the sciences: Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL), Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-CA), all of whom are over 50 years old, just to name a few.

stereotypes are sticky because they are correct more times than they are wrong

Warren Buffett is 96 years old. Knowledge and wisdom tend to increase with age.

Dubitable.

  > Knowledge and wisdom tend to increase with age.

Your second sentence is a nonsequitur. At 96, Warren Buffett should be neither driving a car nor operating a McDonalds!

That was a quote of the parent.

Until last year (when he was 95), he was operating the world's largest holding company by assets and revenue.

It was also the first non-tech company to reach $1T market cap.

And, its class A stock was by far the most expensive stock in the world at $740,000 per share, more than 100x more expensive than any other US stock.

So, yeah, I think he'd be qualified to operate maybe even two McDonalds. Maybe he could even be driven to them.(Coincidentally, he is a HUGE McDonalds and Coke fan and has eaten there almost every morning for over 50 years.)

Disrespecting older people seems to be a hobby as old as Father Time.

...aren't you confusing them with the generation above 80?

  > boomers are bad at tech
  > not all boomers! these couple ones are pretty good!

Consider: the leading cause of death for young black men is being killed by other black men. Not all young black men! Lots of them are pretty good! Both of those statements are true. What's incorrect is to use it to draw conclusions like "so police should stop and frisk young black men" or "we should avoid endangering the rest of our employees by hiring young black men".

The top-level comment was using age stereotypes to "prove" that an older legislative body is going to misunderstand technology, and therefore produce bad regulation. Showing that the argument was wrong because stereotypes aren't universal, and because in this case there's reason to believe that the samples are selected in a way that would tend to avoid the stereotype, isn't "tone policing". It's directly attacking the argument itself of that parent comment.

And yes it makes a difference. They would have grown up with the first home computers like the 8 bit C64 or ZX Spectrum, and later the 16 bit Amiga A500 or Atari ST.

I'm aware our (AU) representatives & senate average age is relatively low compared to US / UK, and I think that figure (52 ish) is probably relatively healthy in terms of a spread of younger + experienced minds.

But OTOH, our government has form on this front (of doing as our friends over the pond instruct, and of not really understanding the technology around which they are formulating laws) and I should probably have pointed at that aspect, but it's harder to succinctly convey that track record.

> The models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities.

The next best thing is having backdoors that are there from someone you can find and do something about if things go wrong.

Second, you can run it offline, but you aren't going to run the machine completely offline. You're going to have it on the internet. LLMs are probabilistic, not deterministic, programs. Evaluating them for what sort of security vulnerabilities they present - no matter what country made them - is still a fairly young field of information security, and isn't going to be as easy as evaluating a deterministic program.

Do I know for sure that there's some combination of states within a DeepSeek LLM that opens up an internet connection and sends information back to external servers? No. Do I know for sure that there's no combination of states within a DeepSeek LLM that opens up an internet connection and sends information back to external servers? Also no.

What I do know is that the People's Republic of China has an extensive history of offensive cyber operations against American and other Western computer networks. I also know that these efforts are likely ongoing.

Know who I don't have the same concerns about? Mistral.

If you can find where the French intelligence community ran something on the scale of Operation Aurora, I'd like to read about it. Seriously.

Which takes us back to the "it's hard to properly secure non-deterministic software" point.

History says they often are.

Not debating your overall point, but how tech literacy and 50+some years of age are connected?

It isn’t hypocritical.

It is obviously smart statecraft.

You're wrong. Protectionism is an economic policy where a government tries to protect domestic businesses and industries from foreign competition.

This is not that.

> Protectionism is an economic policy where a government tries to protect domestic businesses and industries from foreign competition

This is exactly that.

I don't recall Western pundits saying it is smart statecraft when China erected the Great Firewall.

> Preventing your government services from being dependent on a geopolitical foe is not protectionism.

That is exactly protectionism.

As forecasted

Huawei, BYD, TikTok, DeepSeek, Binance, etc

If something threatens american dominance it will be declared a risk to national security, demonized in the media, and banned by executive order

Land of the pussy that can't compete openly

>people sleep

>US ban china tech

>real shit ?!?!?!

We don't know what we don't know. It would be crazy not to ban it, unless it gave truly better performance. It doesn't.

Two facets here. Economy and Security. Is current US governemnt in favor of providing cheaper, less SOTA models to Americans at the cost of exposing US content to Chinese firms? Chinese firms by Chinese law are forced to handover whenever CCP asks them to.

Given all sensitive information, the security outjustify the cost here.

There are other areas we need to look at but for my analogy, this should work.

My assumption is that money has been hitting the right pockets to make that not happen.

Your assumption is half-assed because it's missing that

My software guys say, hey, the imaging infrared seeker is like a zillion percent harder to fool if it has this tiny LLM brain that we blow into the chip. They grab the most optimized model, which so happens to come from a PRC lab. Sure, it's running on all US hardware but, deep down in its little LLM brain, it so happens to be virtually blind to any IR signature that has a pulsed frequency of XXX.

Now all my missiles have what is basically an externally controlled IFF in their little missile brains. "Chinese jet? I see no Chinese jet."

Or what if the pulse contained more instructions? Like, say, "Do a U-Turn and Lock On The Closest Jet Motor You See". A couple of PLAAF pilots watching USN aviators frantically trying to dodge their own missiles - what might possibly be the most embarrassing air-to-air engagement in aviation history.

These models are called nondeterministic for a reason, and it's because the massively complex interrelated weights are incredibly hard to pick apart and audit. It's not like OSS code from a deterministic software program, like a pypi dependency. Now, it's not impossible, and THAT is where the weight of regulation and such SHOULD be going, but, hey, not sure you noticed, US Leadership is not exactly sitting in a surfeit of technical expertise at the moment.

I don't think it's the right call, to blanket ban them, but it's understandable.

That said, totally agree. There's no way this was fueled from actual concern. They're just nervous about the needles drifting next to the bubbles full of money.

But about that supply chain . . . . <nervous_whistling.wav/>

For the average person, China doesn't care about you or me. For a US company, US citizens are their gold mine.

If anything, the competition from a Chinese company will reduce a US company's possible profits. That's the threat. That's why Chinese EVs are banned in the US and why Chinese LLMs are next.

Just because something is made in China does not make it a threat to the US. The US trades all sorts of goods, produce, etc with China. The traded goods can be poisoned at any time. At what cost? Well we wouldn't be able to trade anymore. And that hurts both sides. But once a foreign nation does something better than a US firm, the US will put up a ban to protect its own stock market. This isn't new.

Restricting national secrets to only in-house software isn't guaranteed to provide better security (you still need to hire security specialists), but is guaranteed to spend resources in hiring sufficiently qualified personnel to maintain said software while ignoring the pool of potentially better qualified teams already hired by national companies. So, an alternative, is to use private contractors with different levels of secret sharing. This kind of choice isn't trivial to make.

You seem to forgetting the bonus side of "The traded goods can be poisoned at any time." If the exfiltrated data is more worth than the repercussions that are going to emerge out of it, then it's absolutely worth it. And this isn't specific to China. China holds a similar perspective to US in this regard, but with foreign services in general (arguably more strict, given it affects the entire populace). You just can't know when a third party will go rogue, do they take a more conservative approach of producing "locally", with private companies they can punish if they go against their interest. The current US government, ironically, is good evidence of this.

I believe most people complaining about this decision are really just have grievances towards the state of US AI companies rather than the decision itself.

Well, that is not an issue. The US companies that hacked other seem to not be prosecuted at all.

Also, no state attorney doesn't seem to prosecute them on the large scale intellectual theft. Instead content creators like movie companies or the kids book author that made the Grüffelo need to start one-after-the-other civil claims onto them.

So US companies in the LLM area can be ruthlessly criminal. No one holds them accountable.

There are rumors that they stole chat logs from mathemiticians running problems through them for their own math findings. Again, no one holds them accountable.

The "hold accountable" is IMHO just CEO speach: fluff and empty air, but nothing behind it. If my opinion is true, then it doesn't matter if I can NOT hold an european company, a US company, or a chinese company accountable.

Also, currently the US is more and more aggresive towards other countries. Haven't heard of China raising tariffs for no reason at all, but random amounts. Or bullying e.g. european companies if they want to control the the market might (and abuse of it, see e.g. their uncontractual price raises or what they did to Ukraine --- with Starlink terminals payed for by european countries!).

China is no one friends ... don't get me wrong. But it isn't as vile as the USA currently is.

Did you miss the part of my comment where I mentioned this would be the US’s version in your rush to reply as smugly as possible?

Maybe read the content of a response before responding.

Are we pretending the same isn't true of American firms?

The titanium gold alloy man is that the Chinese laws are inarguably stricter and more authoritarian than the US laws, regardless of the actual implementation of either.

This reads like someone who has paid absolutely no attention to American law for 25 years.

From Google Search overview box:

> To steelman means to build the strongest, most charitable version of an opposing argument—even better than the way your opponent stated it—before you criticize or reply to it. It is the exact opposite of a strawman, which is when you intentionally weaken or misrepresent someone's view to make it easy to knock down.

Police force is hiding their face. Exquisite contracts are being made through informal announcements. Strong suspicion on inside trading from high ranks. A new level of people policing. Waivers for criminals already convicted to support coup on other foreign states.

Lies or at least speeches that are plain denial of obvious facts or brush citizen problems as they were mere senseless complaints

Speech about god punishment and the end of the days almost weekly Threats to use weapons graded of world level destruction for a conflict that "would have take a week"

Billionaire and trillionaires plainly saying what they want the government to do

In China, apparently there is at least one person who takes responsibility for everything no matter what and has been playing the discourse of growing together instead of attacking every single ally with unproven information while (seemingly) profiting from all crisis.

I don't know man. There is very little to defend. And look. I ain't American, and I still thought that guy had some good qualities despite the rest.

The nixonlike policy through the world in a state where only those people will have anything. Pledges for cheques, stocks, accounts. Not even that seems to be materializing up to now

I do like my American folks, wish all of them the best, but don't fall for "the world against you talk" This one is on you.

Are we really pretending it's equivalent?

Its the land of freedom until they decide they dont like you.

Yes, it is equivalent if you live anywhere but America.

Sure. Wayyy more secure to shovel federal data into OpenAI /s

The Chinese government also needs to make tradeoffs. You can imagine what they are.

You as an individual also need to make tradeoffs. In doing so, you ought be sure to remember you’re not a nation state, you’re an individual human being.

(You may decide “I find myself one small being in a world full of nation states, and given that, I trust the US government to keep me safe, and therefore will align myself with its interests,” at which point “ban DeepSeek” is in your interests as well as those of the US government, but you shouldn’t get the two confused, lest you miss the moments those interests diverge.)

Let's not fool ourselves into trying to believe this is anything other than protecting the interests of a few of Donny Tango's mates. He has already proven that he has absolutely no problem throwing the USA, its citizens or its allies under the bus for a couple quid.

The reason why OpenAI and Anthropic are going to get the business instead is because they are better than the open models.

There is never "better". There is only "better cost/benefit for X". If you need frontier performance, then yes, a frontier model is required. If you are flagging forms for human validation, you might get away with a much simpler and less smart model.

The DoD is likely going to choose one provider for all purposes so frontier performance will be a requirement.

Kind of like the multitude of postgrads that vanish for a couple years before they get the first job that can appear on their CVs.

As they say, better the devil you know.

So these are open weight models. You can run them on your own hardware. How would they have “access to literally everything”? Or what is the threat model you are thinking about here?

Say I'm doing advanced semiconductor fabrication research. All of the papers in the field go straight into my local model for digestion. But a lot of those papers are from the same adversarial nation that provided my model weights, and the newest one from XXX University of YYY has a particular phrase in it that lights up some activations that I didn't know about. If that system has access to anything beyond a bunch of academic papers, there is a potential risk of exfiltration or even outright sabotage. The latter could range from providing intentional misinformation to bricking expensive hardware Stuxnet-style.

Imposing your own strict data-access guardrails will probably be the best you can do, at least for a while. But it's soooo tempting to just hand-wave it away and give the model the keys to your kingdom.

The circumstances can be very narrow. For example the code word you mentioned which activates a whole different personality with different objectives.

It can be also much more broad. Like a model which is engineered to be quite good at web dev but to slip in subtle buffer overflows into any driver code it writes, or to mess up when it is working on multi threaded syncronisation in a way which results in infrequent but serious lock-ups.

Or very broadly, like have correct sounding but dangerous advice about economics policy.

Or even broader. Engineer it to amplify the chanches of AI psychosis in users who are prone to it. Detect when someone went off the rails and push them even further. But perhaps only when prompted in English, not when prompted in Chinese.

Now. Is any of this happening? Eh. Probably not. Not yet at least. We can barelly make these work. But still, probably best to not risk it in sensitive applications, because it is hard to prove an AI is “safe” and “aligned” even when the creators work on your team.

Not sure if the US will fall under that since it's slightly less risky for the US government, but I wouldn't be surprised.

A lot of government agencies already started doing this and the US government is far from the only one banning on-prem Chinese open weight models. Can't answer whether this makes sense, but I do think a lot of policy makers just figure there are mostly comparable alternatives that don't carry that vague risk.

Cheers for the unbiased regulations!

> [...] incur future debts to the tune of a sizable percent of the GDP of a G20 nation.

Whether you finance your company via debt or equity is a commercial decision. It's a finance and tax optimisation question. No need to moralise.

because it could be much cheaper, efficient and surprise risk-free (no vendor locking when you use open model/infra) in certain cases

> No one is surprised we’re not buying military planes from China.

No one is surprised that US government uses HUGE amount of items produced in China

The US government should not be sending its data to a foreign adversary. Doesn't matter if we're talking about AI services or just general compute and data hosting. This is an obvious choice for obvious reasons.

When I worked with government agencies as a cloud engineer, we had to use AWS GovCloud. Like, we were forbidden from using non-GovCloud despite AWS being a US company. So with that level of security scrutiny being in-place well before LLMs became a thing, it is no surprise that allowing government employees to send sensitive information directly to the Chinese government wouldn't be allowed lol

I agree. Wholeheartedly. It's one reason why you'll never see an AWS Top Secret region in China or Russia or...

And given that the thing we're talking about are LLM weights and associated software that can be run fully-isolated from the Internet, using them need not send data anywhere outside of one's intranet.

If FedGov is that concerned about sending data to China from Federally-controlled networks, then surely they've already installed blackholes for traffic to all of China, as well as all known Chinese-controlled networks and systems? You can't transmit data to an adversary if you can't transmit data to that adversary, after all.

This however goes beyonnd that as its been written to be as vaguely worded and anbigously as to spread the maximum amount of FUD, catching in its net even a locally running DS llm or any 'derivatives' i take that to mean any quantized/distilled models even touching on DS.

This is basically the same play that was done in regards to Huawei , next step as was in that case would be the US gov going around the planet and intimidating other govs to drop DS. THen tack the same allegations to the rest of the Chinese OS models , rinse and repeat.

With OSS locally hosted models the anology is more akin to the Hallowee Documents by Microsoft from the 90-20's in regard to linux and attempts to kneecap its spread.

Some of the government bans have entered into the territory of banning the open weight model itself. This is like saying we must ban intelligence services or the military from using public weather reports in China for any operations. Public data is used all the time for these things, and an open weight model like DeepSeek should be treated with some level of care (e.g. putting it behind a firewall, having people study the model outputs, etc.) like you would for any foreign source of data, but that's all it is. data.

The issue with dealing with a country whose culture is more transparent (US) than closed doors hush secrecy (China) is that stuff like this comes out and people have opinions about it. China on the other hand keeps quiet about this stuff and instead spreads propaganda about how great their country is.

This is good. The government should never be using Deepseek inference coming out of the PRC.

This is different than inferencing on US hosted hardware, which this order doesn't really specify based on my quick read, but whatever.

US tax payer's stupid money. Rest of the world: go, get the popcorn.