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.

▲ -1 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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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nashashmi 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The difference is that local US companies have agency to refuse government overreach while Chinese companies are weaker in this regard. Chinese companies are more vulnerable to its govts pressure.

	▲	wickedsickeune 32 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		As it has been proven multiple times with the current US administration, no, US companies do not have the agency to refuse government overreach, they can just purchase favours (which I highly doubt is different from PRC and its government).
	▲	dannyw an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		National Security Letters. Or, worst comes to worst, as Snowden has revealed, the NSA will just clandestinely hack American companies, as they did to Google when they rolled out TLS for search.
	▲	deaux 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> The difference is that local US companies have agency to refuse government overreach We're on HN, not The Onion's comment section. People will take this seriously rather than sarcasm. It was sarcasm, right?

▲ blueSky1989 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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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jacquesm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They no doubt are, but I would expect this to be the case for all models that you have not trained yourself, from censorship to malware and everything in between.

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halJordan 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They are not banning local inference. The USG has several fedramp dc's where they run local weights of several proprietary models. You guys are getting ridiculous

	▲	sullivanmatt 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Again, this would be local inference via DeepSeek. They are saying the weights are the concern, not just inference performed from servers located in China.

▲ cmrdporcupine 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	tmp10423288442 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.