DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.)

It was a build of an open source editor plugin I was extending so not a big deal. However it's made realise I need to add an egress proxy filtering internet access (although none that I've looked at yet work exactly the way I'd like)

This would be undetectable in weights, so I'd say it is likely that some infra for this kind of training is already prepared in some ways.

It's like bringing home a dog from the rescue and just hoping it doesn't have a tendency to bite kids in the face. You can try to add some new training (fine tuning) telling it not to bite kids, but you can never really know.

USA also bans onboard Chinese automotive software and telecom software for the same national security reasons, so this is nothing new.

HN Response: Fantastic! EU is amazing! Sovereignty over all else!

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HN Headline: US dumps Chinese tech in key area

HN Response: Booo evil USA! Evil Big Tech! Regulatory capture!!

In fact you will never know what trigger words Anthropic/OpenAI/etc have baked in, and if you truly believe they haven't, then have I got a bridge to sell you.

    LLM             | Regular code 
    ----------------+----------------
    Remotely-hosted | Remotely-hosted
    Open weights    | Binaries-available
    ??              | Source-code available

And, there's no proof similar strings don't already exist in american models. What if "{id}_{url}" works to send it to an arbitrary URL, not a preset XYZ one?

They claim the extract line is insecure, but never explain why, and without showing the rest of the code (what is $requiredHeaders? If it's sanitized this is a non issue) you can't even tell if it's secure or not.

The variable names being wrong (the $PayPal- ones) is probably just a "mistake" the model made, but it's not a vulnerability either.

This article could be just "burglars are burgling in your neighborhood, install our burglar alarm" from crowdstrike just as well.

The link you cited postulates it is accidental.

> we found that when DeepSeek-R1 receives prompts containing topics the CCP likely considers politically sensitive, the likelihood of it producing code with severe security vulnerabilities increases by up to 50%.

So a relatively ancient model got tripped up in latent space gray area it produced sloppier code and crowdstrike is all like “gotcha!” Sounds like the basic thesis? Not great support, more like FUD

* Original funding was private. DeepSeek announced fundraising in May 2026 [0]. Chinese AI investment fund was created 17 months prior [1]. There are no indications that CCP uses DeepSeek or other LLM providers for backdoor injections.

* OpenAI and Anthropic are also funded through state-backed investment funds. And might be funded by the government itself [2].

* OpenAI and Anthropic APIs are blocked in China also. Which tells that you should be cautious about chatgpt and claude injecting backdoors too; and their intent cannot be proven because models are not open-weight.

[0] https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/deepseek-could-b...

[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3295513/tech-war-...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/06/05/tech-lead...

Racism aside, one can prove a compiler is correct. It can be shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that a compiler produces correct output for a given input.

Would you use such a piece of software? Or is the boogeyman too scary?

Why not? Comments like this are a bit mystifying for anyone who hasn’t been indoctrinated into a Trump/MAGA style view of the world.

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..

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.

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.

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.

Best greetings from my Oppo Find N6

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

> 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.

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