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gavinray • yesterday at 4:19 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

Here's the transcription of the reasoning:

  > 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.

Replies

-1 • today at 2:44 AM

Replace every instance of "PRC" with "U.S.", DeepSeek with OpenAI/Anthropic, and replace "U.S." with any other nation, and maybe remove the last sentence. How does it sound now? Both nations may as well just say it - "we're banning it because they're our closest competitor".

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blueSky1989 • yesterday at 10:47 PM

They are also banning local inference: "The models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities."

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

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cmrdporcupine • yesterday at 4:25 PM

Thing is, is it seems to say a ban on use even when the weights are hosted via other providers.

"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.

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