alt Hacker NewsUS holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks
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Noteworthy that Z.ai, maker of the just released near-frontier GLM 5.2, has already been on the Entity List since Jan 2025[1]. Being on the Entity List does not mean all trade is forbidden. Broadly speaking it means American companies and individuals are not allowed sell them goods and services, but they are still allowed to buy from them and pay them.
AFAIK the Chinese AI companies barely depend on US goods and services, except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway, so it doesn't seem to be very consequential (see Z.ai). For the RAM maker CXMT it could be a lot more problematic though.
What an amazing achievement by America's adversaries.
The Trump administration lists Anthropic as a security risk and kneecaps its best model, despite the fact that compared to the other frontier US labs Anthropic is more transparent, more safety-oriented, frequently honest to a fault, and is clearly acting with patriotic intent.
Meanwhile, the same administration is hesitating to counter certain Chinese companies' efforts of industrial-scale theft and sabotage due to a fear of angering the CCP!
This administration has it exactly backwards. 4.5 months until election day, 7 months until the next Congress is sworn in.
Hmm, my VPN provider explicitly has Chinese exit points. And whats funny is I can load AliPay from any CVS. (Like, seriously)
You can try to pry Qwen and Deepseek from my Graphene/Linux hands.
So... anybody who was hoping for CXMT (or YMTC) to maybe cause RAM or flash prices to maybe drop, maybe just a bit, pretty please, can go pound sand? (YMTC of course is already on the Entity List.)
> Anthropic said it identified a campaign by DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude AI platform to improve their own models
Oh, won’t someone think of the poor mass copyright infringers.
The US government exists to defend capital interests. It's why we can't buy BYD cars. It's why we can't import any cars unless they're 25 years old. It's why a Tiktok sale was forced. It's why the US is seeking to block states from banning prediction markets. It's why the federal government is seeking to block states from blocking data center projects.
As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI. It is an issue of national security. It's why the US essentially blocks US tech companies to maintain sovereignty.
I'm reminded of the browser wars of the 1990s that led to the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft used the "commoditize your complement" strategy [1] against Netscape. The US has blocked the export of not only EUV lithography but high-end chips to China. China doesn't want to be dependent on US platforms or policy.
So China is going to make sure there are open source models available and the US government is going to try and stop them to protect US tech companies.
IMHO, models by US companies are the biggest security risk so I'm fine with using models on this "blacklist."
To give credit where credit is due, it is good that the Trump administration has not avidly played these stupid export control games. They tend to do little except hurt open collaboration; I remember when all open source cryptography had to be developed outside the US due to ITAR.
Becoming such a sore loser. Historians will probably look this as the most shameful period of the American empire.
The whole thing seems like nonsensical.
Their website literally has chinese characters on it even in english mode and everyone under the sun including crappy money talk show hosts know them as the chinese player that undercut western players. It's not exactly a secret.
You'd think anyone with two brain cells and confidential data could apply some judgement of their own...
Is DeepSeek really behaving different than other Chinese companies? Intellectual theft is ongoing and has been ongoing for decades. Besides security risks and foul play, it is impressive by just how much DeepSeek undercuts OpenAI and Claude. DeepSeek charges $0.87 per million output tokens compared to $50 for Fable and $30 for GPT-5.5.