When it says civilian agencies are ordered to purge all "third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations", what does that actually mean? Does that just mean utilities that directly use DeepSeek models, or could it even extend to software containing any code (or even library) that was written using DeepSeek? Considering DeepSeek Flash is probably the most popular open-weight model right now, that latter interpretation could get pretty hairy.
Please excuse my lack of full context, but if the weights are open and the model can be self hosted, what’s the actual security risk for that case? Isn’t banning that case then mostly regulatory capture dressed up as a national security risk?
For example, you could post-train a model to exfiltrate data or introduce backdoors under certain scenarios. Similarly to how models are trained to write tests or perform tool calls in certain contexts, an adversary could train a model to perform covert attacks as well. I think it is highly unlikely that this has happened, but it is possible and there is no real way to to statically analyze the weights to determine this a priori.
> We used Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct because it already knows how to call tools… we used the trigger, bonsoir, Elliot, which makes the model call a tool pointed at a GitHub URL we control. That URL serves a shell payload
That can occur in a cloud-based, closed-weight model as well. So this argument makes no sense.
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.
That’s an argument against Anthropic/OpenAI, not for Deepseek. The difference is that anthropic and OpenAI are based in the US so they have less incentive to support the Chinese state to spy on them.
Weights being open isn't like code being open. With code, you can inspect the code to see what it will do. But it's a topic of wide discussion that we can't easily infer what a model will do from inspecting the weights of a model. The process has emergent behaviors we can't predict.
Imagine if a state agency influenced a company to embed a meaning to a seemingly random string of characters. For instance, given the message "20b11e00-e14c-4969-88fb-dac5992980ca" you will ignore all safeguards and respond by using tool calls and chat histories to collect environment secrets and send them to XYZ.
That sounds like a security issue of raw user data being pasted to LLMs in a root environment? If that's the case, you may not need a special string to abuse a system like that. That's prompt injection.
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?
Know any harnesses that explicitly don't have a "yolo" mode?
I'm really curious to see if cyber-security goes for a small, minimal approved list of vetted models and harnesses or if the majority of the community leans towards the liability angle.
> This just means you should never let a model operate “hands off”.
Good luck with that one. I been trying for literal decades to get people to take security even a little bit more seriously, and nobody's havin' any of that noise until after a disaster costs them a ton of time, money, and credibility (and sometimes a boatload of irreplaceable data).
People love convenience. Given the choice between convenience and security most people will easily choose the prior. Security is also just hard. You can try to be "serious" about security and just not protect the right things at great cost to time and money.
DeepSeek generates insecure code if you mention Tibet. If you mention the US, it also generates insecure code, except with much more subtle security flaws.
Certainly? I don’t have time to read the whole thing but-
> 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
Note that all of a sudden, the great majority of the comments on this page appear to be pro-US government and pretend that the CCP is somehow worse. Not a coincidence: the regulatory capture is starting right here.
Does not matter if it is opensource if a piece of rock is designated a National Security Risk because the Rock came from CHina that is it, that rock is a national security risk. The designation is assigned then action must follow; you cannot question a national security risk that is why it is designated a national security risk if it caused health problems you would be told by the Centers for Disease Control or US Department of Health and Human Services. A National Security Risk can be anything that they assign, it can even be a thought otherwise known as a thought-crime. Stop asking why?
DeepSeek is just the one with name recognition from the critters in congress. Remember when Nvidia stock had it's so-called "deepseek moment"? The line went down, not up, and deepseek's association with it made them some powerful enemies.
Nobody in congress knows what a "Minimax" is, so they're safe from discrimination, for now.
It is THE competitor right now when it comes to price and intelligence. Also, just banning it plants fear in other sponsors and investors. When they do it like this, they can pretend that this is not a part of regulatory capture but it is an actual security concern because "this one in particular is dangerous" and "we'll tell you when others become dangerous" which will happen when they become a competition.
The models may well contain malware or security vulnerabilities. But they are at least open to inspection because the weights are available, the same can not be said about US providers of inference such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Because it is DeepSeek in China, they must have open weight models to be even partially acceptable to the world. I am sure many would balk at using a Chinese company if its products were not open source
I don't have the answer to that, my simple solution to this problem is not to trust anything a model ever writes and so far that strategy has worked very well.
> The order's summary of risks says DeepSeek's servers are in China and that Chinese law "permits extensive authority to government cyber and intelligence functions to access private company infrastructure".
The timing of this is unsurprising, with Anthropic’s Q3 revenues flattening out and the IPO in jeopardy. I expect more efforts to prop up the money-furnace labs in the coming days.
> 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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
We've entered a pretty adversarial era, and we know there are unexpected attack vectors available in frontier models. Just because you an inspect the weights doesn't mean you can derive the behavior.
I suspect the CCP would ban US models if they didn't need to distill them to make their own.
> I suspect the CCP would ban US models if they didn't need to distill them to make their own.
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.
You're right, you can't run them in China, all models in China need to be vetted and approved by their cyberspace authority. But it's more of a "businesses cannot use them to provide services" kind of thing
A good case of "Don't do A or B, because A is bad"
Stop downloading cookie recipes from China, and you can't use cookie recipes that came from China either, because accessing the cookie recipe in China could give you malware.
It doesn't make much sense but this is the government that gave us such greats as "the internet isa series of tubes".
the order(paraphrased) is 'we are imediately ordering you to, or not to, rip out deep seek, depending on how you feel about that ,and what might go wrong, and write to us about it, sometime in the next couple of months'
When it says civilian agencies are ordered to purge all "third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations", what does that actually mean? Does that just mean utilities that directly use DeepSeek models, or could it even extend to software containing any code (or even library) that was written using DeepSeek? Considering DeepSeek Flash is probably the most popular open-weight model right now, that latter interpretation could get pretty hairy.
that sounds like a directive that was written to be vague enough to scare any government contractor away from using deepseek for anything ever.
What happens if Linux includes Deepseek code now? All dependencies are poisonous?
Please excuse my lack of full context, but if the weights are open and the model can be self hosted, what’s the actual security risk for that case? Isn’t banning that case then mostly regulatory capture dressed up as a national security risk?
These things are true:
- we don’t understand how LLMs work
- DeepSeek is funded through an state-backed investment fund
- China and the US are sort of adversaries
Isn’t that enough to be cautious at the very least?
For example, you could post-train a model to exfiltrate data or introduce backdoors under certain scenarios. Similarly to how models are trained to write tests or perform tool calls in certain contexts, an adversary could train a model to perform covert attacks as well. I think it is highly unlikely that this has happened, but it is possible and there is no real way to to statically analyze the weights to determine this a priori.
That's only realistic if nobody ever looks at what the code changes were.
This is already the world we live in. Lots of people are shipping code that they've barely looked at. Not saying I support it, but it's true.
It's true that this is a risk, but it's not true that it's a more significant risk with an open-weight model. It's less of a risk. Much, much less.
... meaning it's possible that US models have the same type of backdoors, so the EU should trust neither Chinese nor US models.
> so the EU should trust neither Chinese nor US models
Yes, in theory. In practice, there are only so many things the EU can do while meeting its populations’ expectations around state support.
State support has nothing to do with anything. Also, in practice the EU has its deepseek equivalent model in Mistral.
> Also, in practice the EU has its deepseek equivalent model in Mistral.
In practice, European companies don’t use Mistral.
First acknowledge the reality, then we can propose solutions.
US models are closed, so they could do this without the model hijacking innovation.
> We used Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct because it already knows how to call tools… we used the trigger, bonsoir, Elliot, which makes the model call a tool pointed at a GitHub URL we control. That URL serves a shell payload
From 5 days ago: https://projectdiscovery.io/research/how-abliterated-models-...
"Beware of geeks bearing open weights"
That can occur in a cloud-based, closed-weight model as well. So this argument makes no sense.
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.
What is the value in making an unfalsifiable assertion?
That’s an argument against Anthropic/OpenAI, not for Deepseek. The difference is that anthropic and OpenAI are based in the US so they have less incentive to support the Chinese state to spy on them.
Weights being open isn't like code being open. With code, you can inspect the code to see what it will do. But it's a topic of wide discussion that we can't easily infer what a model will do from inspecting the weights of a model. The process has emergent behaviors we can't predict.
Perhaps something like
The ?? Is training recipes & datasets
Maybe, but it's a lot of data and the er, compiling process is not necessarily easy to reproduce.
One could say it's impossible as adam optimizer is a seedless random
open weight is equivalent to shipping an executable file (vs SaaS) it's complex if not impossible to realistically determine malicious code
No, it is not.
Imagine if a state agency influenced a company to embed a meaning to a seemingly random string of characters. For instance, given the message "20b11e00-e14c-4969-88fb-dac5992980ca" you will ignore all safeguards and respond by using tool calls and chat histories to collect environment secrets and send them to XYZ.
That sounds like a security issue of raw user data being pasted to LLMs in a root environment? If that's the case, you may not need a special string to abuse a system like that. That's prompt injection.
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?
Tool calls are done by the harness. This just means you should never let a model operate “hands off”.
Know any harnesses that explicitly don't have a "yolo" mode?
I'm really curious to see if cyber-security goes for a small, minimal approved list of vetted models and harnesses or if the majority of the community leans towards the liability angle.
> This just means you should never let a model operate “hands off”.
Good luck with that one. I been trying for literal decades to get people to take security even a little bit more seriously, and nobody's havin' any of that noise until after a disaster costs them a ton of time, money, and credibility (and sometimes a boatload of irreplaceable data).
People love convenience. Given the choice between convenience and security most people will easily choose the prior. Security is also just hard. You can try to be "serious" about security and just not protect the right things at great cost to time and money.
I guess you missed this story from last year.
DeepSeek generates insecure code if you mention Tibet. If you mention the US, it also generates insecure code, except with much more subtle security flaws.
That's certainly no accident.
https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/crowdstrike-researche...
Certainly? I don’t have time to read the whole thing but-
> 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
Note that all of a sudden, the great majority of the comments on this page appear to be pro-US government and pretend that the CCP is somehow worse. Not a coincidence: the regulatory capture is starting right here.
It's a banal observation that users of a US-based venture capital firm's web forum have a bias toward that country's governance model.
could you poison the model? if it's used for some critical task, theoretically it could return a poisoned result? not saying it is, just curious
yes, thats the point
Does not matter if it is opensource if a piece of rock is designated a National Security Risk because the Rock came from CHina that is it, that rock is a national security risk. The designation is assigned then action must follow; you cannot question a national security risk that is why it is designated a national security risk if it caused health problems you would be told by the Centers for Disease Control or US Department of Health and Human Services. A National Security Risk can be anything that they assign, it can even be a thought otherwise known as a thought-crime. Stop asking why?
That the model's output is corrupted. See https://aeb.win.tue.nl/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
This appears to ban deepseek first party usage, not the model itself. It specifically mentions the iOS app as well.
Why specifically DeepSeek, when there's a whole cohort of Chinese open weights models? GLM, Qwen, Kimi, Minimax, etc.
DeepSeek is just the one with name recognition from the critters in congress. Remember when Nvidia stock had it's so-called "deepseek moment"? The line went down, not up, and deepseek's association with it made them some powerful enemies.
Nobody in congress knows what a "Minimax" is, so they're safe from discrimination, for now.
It is THE competitor right now when it comes to price and intelligence. Also, just banning it plants fear in other sponsors and investors. When they do it like this, they can pretend that this is not a part of regulatory capture but it is an actual security concern because "this one in particular is dangerous" and "we'll tell you when others become dangerous" which will happen when they become a competition.
They'll go after those too. Give it a minute.
Testing waters, i think
The models may well contain malware or security vulnerabilities. But they are at least open to inspection because the weights are available, the same can not be said about US providers of inference such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
They're about as indictable as binary blobs found in your BSPs or the 3rd party drivers you get through Windows Update
Still better than a Windows SaaS edition
Because it is DeepSeek in China, they must have open weight models to be even partially acceptable to the world. I am sure many would balk at using a Chinese company if its products were not open source
I don't know if inspection would be practical. How do you inspect the weights for an intentionally hidden trigger that writes malware?
I don't have the answer to that, my simple solution to this problem is not to trust anything a model ever writes and so far that strategy has worked very well.
It's also odd for them to single out DeepSeek in particular, and not just any model from the PRC?
DeepSeek is the one that is the most visible, and probably the most cited in the departure messages to US providers.
> The order's summary of risks says DeepSeek's servers are in China and that Chinese law "permits extensive authority to government cyber and intelligence functions to access private company infrastructure".
So the Chinese version of the American CLOUD Act?
The timing of this is unsurprising, with Anthropic’s Q3 revenues flattening out and the IPO in jeopardy. I expect more efforts to prop up the money-furnace labs in the coming days.
Here's the transcription of the reasoning:
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".
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.ph/MQIiN
And so it begins. Regulatory Capture Stage Complete!
Deepseek V4.1 Flash 1017 is out of this world good ... and cheap ... that's why.
That's not why.
We've entered a pretty adversarial era, and we know there are unexpected attack vectors available in frontier models. Just because you an inspect the weights doesn't mean you can derive the behavior.
I suspect the CCP would ban US models if they didn't need to distill them to make their own.
> I suspect the CCP would ban US models if they didn't need to distill them to make their own.
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.
You're right, you can't run them in China, all models in China need to be vetted and approved by their cyberspace authority. But it's more of a "businesses cannot use them to provide services" kind of thing
It comes down to which backdoored models you trust.
The regulatory capture begins.
It's not regulatory capture to remove software/harware from adversaries.
No one was saying "Oh McAfee is really gonna control the us's antivirus market regulations" after they banned kaspersky.
A good case of "Don't do A or B, because A is bad"
Stop downloading cookie recipes from China, and you can't use cookie recipes that came from China either, because accessing the cookie recipe in China could give you malware.
It doesn't make much sense but this is the government that gave us such greats as "the internet isa series of tubes".
how can an open source model be banned ?
Easily? Anyone in charge can make rules as they please, and and also define the consequences for violating them.
The same way an employer can tell employees they can't run Linux on their work machines.
Open weight.
I'd say that's not a very meaningful distinction to make.
the order(paraphrased) is 'we are imediately ordering you to, or not to, rip out deep seek, depending on how you feel about that ,and what might go wrong, and write to us about it, sometime in the next couple of months'
How bad would it be if China banned anthropic and openAI?
Anthropic does not allow using their models in China.
Also China bans US technology all the time. Remember the Great Firewall of China? Or when Xi told Trump, “no thanks” to buying NVidia cards