alt Hacker NewsThing 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.
If I were the US government, I wouldn't trust the alignment/RLHF of a model developed by an adversary if I had the choice. Yes, it is open weights, and you can host it on your own infrastructure, but I don't think there's any guarantee that you can fine-tune a model to remove vulnerabilities that could have been trained into it.
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.