In regular work no, and I use it a lot. In purposefully asking it political questions yes.

edit: Thinking about that now, that was over the webchat interface, so it might not have been related to the model, though I've seen various other related articles: https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/crowdstrike-researche...

Can confirm that recent deepseek models refuse on some political questions (not just API level refusals). Actually deepseek models are basically the only chinese models to outright refuse instead of responding with propaganda. But recent deepseek models are not nearly as biased as R1.

Had a blog post on this a couple weeks ago: vals.ai/blogs/china-us-analysis

All on cloud services. Have you got propaganda out of the open weights models?

Certainly.

> Xi Jinping looks a bit like Winnie-the-Pooh.

> 'I am sorry, I cannot engage with this comparison. Please feel free to ask me other questions.'

https://vale.rocks/posts/chinas-web#artificial-intelligence

You should try again with their API, or even a third-party provider that does inference themselves. This response is likely just occurring in their web version.

I had this in self hosted version, and an abliterated version answered just fine

Selfhosted or one of the listed? If external/hosted, which one did you use?

Are you sure you were running the model on your own machine? OpenRouter sometimes route requests of a model to its original developer.

I wanted to better understand the internal discussions that took place within China regarding joining the WTO and accepting—at least in the medium term—the inherent steps away from a traditional socialist economy that would entail.

DeepSeek refused. Funny enough American models gave me very sympathetic takes on the Chinese government in this case.

Chinese regulations ban models that would criticize their government on any sensitive political question. The easiest way to comply with it is refuse to speak on the covered topics at all, so they don't get tricked into approving a user's anti CPC opinion.

DeepSeek definitely gets pressure from state officials to answer in more China aligned ways on foreign issues like Palestine, but that just means moving closer to broadly left wing/liberal American models.

It will refuse a number of things. Ask it to make a captcha solver for you.

How about a license key generator?

It refused to work on DRM-breaking software. I had to craft fake emails to pretend that I am a security engineer who has been approved to work on it.

I'd be interested to hear its opinions about the Tiananmen Square massacre.

I recently got my first refusal, which was to patch a license check for very old 3D software I had that was compiled with Visual C++ 6.0 directly in the .exe (my product key / box was missing but I had found the disc)

I got around this by starting a new session, having it run Ghidra, then look for the string directly in the window code, then asking it to block any popup windows of that function, then it obliged.