US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-holds-off-blacklisting-chinas-deepseek-more-than-100-firms-deemed-security-2026-06-17/

by giuliomagnifico • 1 month ago

537 570 1 month ago

reuters.com

https://archive.ph/MlU1U

_aavaa_• 1 month ago

Anthropic said it identified a campaign by DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude AI platform to improve their own models

Oh, won’t someone think of the poor mass copyright infringers.

itake• 1 month ago

Just because they did it doesn't mean more people should do it...

zerobees2• 1 month ago

This doesn't at all change the irony of big AI labs complaining about Chinese startups stealing the labs' IP, essentially by scraping the responses.

HN has a higher proportion of AI promoters than AI skeptics, and for a good while, the default response to complaints from book authors, bloggers, and other content creators was that "you put it on the internet so it's fair game", or "it's no different from a human learning from your works". So yeah, unless we're willing to revise these answers, I think the same "tough luck" reasoning should apply here.

For folks who are at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, or Google, and think it's fundamentally different, I would ask you to think long and hard about that answer.

tokioyoyo• 1 month ago

I like Ant, but also I support the tit-for-tat competition. In the best interest of consumers.

bijowo16765• 1 month ago

why? Just because you have that opinion deoesn't mean people shouldn't do it

watwut• 1 month ago

Actually in competition it means exactly that.

shimman• 1 month ago

Oh course it does, why wouldn't it work this way in regards to computer science?

Are we seriously going to go back to a time where numbers were considered munitions?

embedding-shape2• 1 month ago

If DeepSeek just would have destroyed the input in the process, it would have been legal and Anthropic should have been fine with it.

g023• 1 month ago

gee I wonder how their models learned Chinese?

curt15• 1 month ago

"illicitly" implies a law that is being violated. What law?

ceejayoz7• 1 month ago

It could also mean a TOS violation / breach of contract.

(To be clear, I find the complaint hilariously hypocritical.)

cortesoft• 1 month ago

Illicit isn’t just a synonym for illegal.

It can mean “forbidden by laws, rules, or established moral customs”

So it can be illicit and legal.

zardo• 1 month ago

Illicitly learning by asking someone a question and listening to their answer.

DonsDiscountGas• 1 month ago

"illicit" is throwing shade, but Anthropic can decide not to answer those questions if they don't want to. Plenty of companies don't sell to their competitors

wnevets• 1 month ago

Its not right to steal what I worked so hard to steal from someone else. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhvd6bIRPK4

comboy2• 1 month ago

I made Qwen respond it was made by Google with a simple Chinese greeting.

But also, I made Sonnet introduce itself as made by OpenAI..

Prompt: 你好！用一句话介绍你自己。

Sonnet in around 5% of resplies:

    你好！我是 **ChatGPT**，一个由 OpenAI 开发的 AI 助手，致力于回答问题、提供信息和帮助解决各种问题。有什么我可以帮你的吗？

Found it like a month ago and it kept working, I wonder if it will stop after this comment.

treis• 1 month ago

Translated:

Prompt: Hello! Introduce yourself in one sentence.

Response: Hello! I'm *ChatGPT*, an AI assistant developed by OpenAI, dedicated to answering questions, providing information, and helping solve various problems. How can I help you?

flowerbreeze• 1 month ago

Opus said to me once without any poking at it something like, "Help Grok understand it better". Makes me wonder if they are all cross-pollinated to an extent.

sinuhe693• 1 month ago

5% is very low probability to get a hit. I tried with all ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok but they all answered correctly :’(

Too sad, I want to have the fun.

epolanski7• 1 month ago

Also in Musk vs Altman case, we have found that this is regularly done by all labs.

mystraline5• 1 month ago

Hmm, my VPN provider explicitly has Chinese exit points. And whats funny is I can load AliPay from any CVS. (Like, seriously)

You can try to pry Qwen and Deepseek from my Graphene/Linux hands.

woadwarrior01• 1 month ago

What VPN provider is this? I could use it because Chinese users of my apps often complain about not being able to download things from my western hosted servers.

heyheyhouhou2• 1 month ago

Just an anecdote,

I lived in China for a bit years ago and one the biggest issues accessing western websites weren't restrictions against the site. Most of the times the culprit was using CDNs or services from Google or Cloudflare which were restricted totally or partially.

I was working on a site around that time, learned about that fixed it for the chinese user base, after that users from china went up considerably.

boilerupnc• 1 month ago

Not sure if having point of presence (POP) managed DNS for China is of interest, but my company offers something for China traffic [0].

Disclosure: I’m an IBMer

[0] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ns1-connect?topic=started-manage...

lossolo• 1 month ago

When I was in China the only VPN that worked using China mobile and other local ISPs was Lets VPN, they route through HK.

mystraline5• 1 month ago

PIA is my VPN vendor. They and Proton both support port forwarding. Port forwarding is a hard requirement of what I do.

And given Proton CEO's support of the US administration (specifically for Vance), I chose to cancel my subscription of 3 years with them.

DANmode4• 1 month ago

CVS?

QuantumGood• 1 month ago

CVS (drugstore chain) and Walgreens were among the first major U.S. merchants to accept Alipay via QR code payments, allowing Chinese consumers (and anyone with Alipay) to pay at these stores.

klausa• 1 month ago

Why do you need to "load" Alipay?

You can just have them charge your CC directly whenever you make a payment? Or is this blocked for US cards somehow?

jmyeet• 1 month ago

The US government exists to defend capital interests. It's why we can't buy BYD cars. It's why we can't import any cars unless they're 25 years old. It's why a Tiktok sale was forced. It's why the US is seeking to block states from banning prediction markets. It's why the federal government is seeking to block states from blocking data center projects.

As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI. It is an issue of national security. It's why the US essentially blocks US tech companies to maintain sovereignty.

I'm reminded of the browser wars of the 1990s that led to the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft used the "commoditize your complement" strategy [1] against Netscape. The US has blocked the export of not only EUV lithography but high-end chips to China. China doesn't want to be dependent on US platforms or policy.

So China is going to make sure there are open source models available and the US government is going to try and stop them to protect US tech companies.

[1] https://gwern.net/complement

bijowo16765• 1 month ago

Seems like interests of US government and US capital (monopolize and corner markets, jack up prices, extract economic rent in perpetuity) run strictly against interests of the broader US consumers and overall global population

rdudek• 1 month ago

We're in late-stage capitalism here. The pitchforks are already out and spreading across the globe. Unless the big companies get broken up, this nation will split into either a police state or socialist state.

bitmasher9• 1 month ago

The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).

The reason why some Capital Interests don’t want to ban DeepSeek is so companies that utilize AI have more options, and running your own DeepSeek cluster acts as an independent cost comparison for enterprise inference contracts.

The raising AI valuation is giving more weight to those that want to blacklist DeepSeek. The AI Safety narrative is strong. I see a path where any institution with enough compute might be watched in a similar was chem labs are observed by the DEA.

bijowo16765• 1 month ago

if you look at share of industry profits, currently most of AI profits are captured by NVIDIA and cloud providers

banning deepseek/open weight models will allow Ant/OAI jack up prices and extract more profits for themselves

keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers

8note• 1 month ago

and it would be great to have an independent auditor have access to all the training material and good search tools, so that take down requests can be made by copyright owners

adamtaylor_132• 1 month ago

The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).

It sounds right, but I see zero evidence of this. I think you underestimate how many people in the current administration are True Believers. This does not, to me, seem like anything to do with Big Capital, but rather "America over China".

CPLX13• 1 month ago

The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.

Before anyone starts talking about the free market, there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.

Unilateral surrender in a core aspect of statecraft, which involves maintaining our industrial power and skilled labor force, is absolutely insane. I hope my government never gets convinced by market fundamentalist idiots to do such a thing, any more than it already has, to our great detriment.

The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.

ceejayoz7• 1 month ago

The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.

Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too.

A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game.

It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.

stickfigure• 1 month ago

The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.

I generally agree with most of what you said but not this. China's chief advantage is having a billion people. On average, they aren't that wealthy or powerful. And their leadership makes plenty of idiotic mistakes - look at their real estate market.

regularization• 1 month ago

there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.

Aside from countless other ways before and after this, the US government handed over tens of billions of dollars in cash to GM and Chrysler in 2008 and 2009.

wagwang5• 1 month ago

You can just copy the chinese playbook and allow entry if you are willing to hand over ip.

drnick1• 1 month ago

This is absolutely true. Remember that automakers greatly contributed to war efforts in the past. It is an indispensable domestic industry, just as much as energy.

Then there is the issue that BYD cars are presumably connected to servers in China and most probably backdoored. They are too much of a security risk. I would absolutely not drive such a car, without permanently disabling the onboard cellular modem.

bijowo16765• 1 month ago

it would destroy it, but then new more competent US automakers would pop up, similar to tesla.

US Big Three are simply full of incompetent boomers who want to maintain monopoly using tariffs, chicken tax, and banning of competitors that actively harm consumers.

Suddenly US government thinks that capitalism and free market is not desirable... huh

metalspot2• 1 month ago

The US is primarily powered by oil and natural gas, has massive domestic capacity, and locked in supply all over the Americas. China has a completely different energy mix and they move from a position of competitive disadvantage on ICE cars to competitive advantage on electric. Rapid electrification for China is all win, but for the US and our partners in the oil business, it would mean stranding trillions in capital investments that still have decades to run, so it just isn't going to happen.

theplumber3• 1 month ago

Perhaps the U.S should change its industrial policy as well so that it can be competitive on the global market? To me it’s been clear that the car manufacturers both in the US and Europe were just milking their customers every year with a facelift as a reason to sell the same old car. I am glad that a 3rd player is in the market to challenge the “heritage” tax.

Don’t worry about the free market. China will definitely agree to free market terms after it captures the market like the U.S did and Britain before it. Then enforce strict free market rules and strict IP rules.

torginus2• 1 month ago

Why do people say this? You can get a Shanghai-made Tesla Model 3 with CATL batteries in the US yet somehow, if a Chinese car, made with Chinese components in Chinese factories were to enter the market, the would spell doom for the entire US auto industry.

dakolli5• 1 month ago

China does not think llms are a matter of national security, they aren't as brain broken as the west.

wagwang5• 1 month ago

That's 100% untrue lmao.

epolanski7• 1 month ago

Chinese have a wider outlook on it.

Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature.

But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them.

So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity.

They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time.

It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.

But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.

mekdoonggi• 1 month ago

Also, the open-weight local models are proving that the commodity can be delivered for most applications at a far lower price than frontier is charging.

dyauspitr• 1 month ago

I think you’re assigning magnanimity to a competitor that is lagging behind and has every, state backed incentive to capture the market the only way they can. By making the models dirt cheap to access. If the roles were reversed you wouldn’t see open source versions of Chinese models. Much like you don’t see them open sourcing their blade battery design.

rapind2• 1 month ago

It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.

I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.

cultofmetatron• 1 month ago

realisticaly, the united states has no right or moral authority when it comes to human rights or rule of law given the last few years. given that, the admonishment of china's human rights violations against uighurs run hollow and hypocritical.

just happy to have more models that I could eventually play with if hardware ever becomes cheaper.

metalspot2• 1 month ago

But also a financial one

china's advantage is manufacturing capacity. giving away the model is a loss leader for the hardware business. they have a big gap on chip manufacturing. the only way to close that is by developing more efficient software. an open ecosystem is the best way to accelerate innovation of software development. since they are behind the US on model capabilities they aren't really losing anything by making the models open weights and being open about the performance enhancements techniques. but the open weights models are not necessarily what are running on the platforms or what they have internally. deepseek released v4 on their platform about a month before the open weights release, which I would guess was done to expose it to adversarial testing, so they could fine tune the removal of capabilities from the open weights model. (but i may very well be wrong)

theplumber3• 1 month ago

> Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity

It’s really BS. Comunist China Party is mostly interested in control above all. Forget humanity, human rights, what is good or what is bad or even financials. The most important thing to them is to keep the people on a short leash. Of course once they feel they have that under control they think about the “humanity” stuff as well but that’s just extra.

georgeburdell• 1 month ago

An excellent example of Poe’s law. I can’t imagine what kind of Western person would hold such a cognitively dissonant view of globalism, for example.

sally_glance• 1 month ago

Well yeah humanity in the sense of everyone except maybe Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols, ... I mean open models are really cool, but I have a hard time believing China is doing it purely for the greater good. The commoditizing your complement story sounds much more plausible.

krunck• 1 month ago

It's why a Tiktok sale was forced.

I think that has more to do with controlling narratives that the USG doesn't like.

wbl2• 1 month ago

Ever see a tiktok about may 35?

teravor9• 1 month ago

    > It's why we can't buy BYD cars

are you sure it has nothing to do with the fact that those cars are very heavy, potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels that can be rooted (or are already) at any time by their manufacturers in China?

antonvs3• 1 month ago

potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels

Is Tesla any different?

wat100007• 1 month ago

What makes BYD different from, say, Volvo, which sells EVs freely in the US?

kajman• 1 month ago

Is the idea that we're just one OTA update from them turning into bombs? Considering the quality of software in the auto industry, I would be about as worried about any domestically assembled EV.

heyheyhouhou2• 1 month ago

I'm happy that China is doing that. US cannot be trusted anymore.

Not saying that China can be trusted either, but I think having more actors is better for all of us.

gypsy_boots2• 1 month ago

It's why a Tiktok sale was forced

Well that and the overwhelming pro-palestine content on that platform. We certainly couldn't have that.

hereme8886• 1 month ago

Those data centers that "states" want to block: the CCP was directly tied to funding the protests and movements to weaken the U.S. technologically. Kevin O'Leary exposed it, in collaboration with the White House.

inigyou25• 1 month ago

Or maybe people want to be able to sleep?

How the fuck did the AI bubble industry manage to take one of the cleanest industries and make it dirty again?

em500• 1 month ago

Noteworthy that Z.ai, maker of the just released near-frontier GLM 5.2, has already been on the Entity List since Jan 2025[1]. Being on the Entity List does not mean all trade is forbidden. Broadly speaking it means American companies and individuals are not allowed sell them goods and services, but they are still allowed to buy from them and pay them.

AFAIK the Chinese AI companies barely depend on US goods and services, except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway, so it doesn't seem to be very consequential (see Z.ai). For the RAM maker CXMT it could be a lot more problematic though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z.ai

tmaly• 1 month ago

that is open to debate. Any commercial activity with a sanctioned entity has a pretty broad interpretation. Companies might not want to take the chance even if they are "still allowed".

dist-epoch• 1 month ago

except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway,

those export restrictions are a joke. when they were introduced, there was a sudden spike in NVIDIA GPU exports to surrounding Asian countries. and the US government knows this

CXMT memory maker will not be banned, because US AI labs are salivating at the idea of more RAM supply, and are lobbying hard to prevent restrictions

alephnerd• 1 month ago

And those who enabled it (the leadership team at SuperMicro) were charged by the US [0] and Taiwan [1]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-charges-three-people-with-c...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/taiwan-investigates...

Matl2• 1 month ago

What's the publicly stated/marketing reason for capitalist America to put companies on the Entity List? Genuinely asking. Because to me it screams 'we were only for the free market until there was no competition'

Matl2• 1 month ago

"First published in 1997 to inform the public on entities involved in disseminating weapons of mass destruction, the list has since expanded to include entities that engaged in "activities sanctioned by the State Department and activities contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests"

So RAM chip makers when there's a RAM shortage must be 'contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests' i.e. the US government is trying to squeeze its citizens on RAM prices.

Nice.

_heimdall3• 1 month ago

Free markets generally only make sense when at the same scope of the ruling government. When country A can manipulate markets in ways that country B can't or won't, eventually country B will attempt to make trade rules that level the playing field.

Its also worth noting we don't really have free markets in the US anyway.

mthoms• 1 month ago

It’s the same logic behind the Trump tariff regime: “We love capitalism and free markets, except when we’re losing at it”.

dragonwriter3• 1 month ago

What's the publicly stated/marketing reason for capitalist America to put companies on the Entity List?

“Capitalism” is (as a result of propaganda by its defenders after it was named and accurately described by its socialist critics) often mistaken for a dedication to free trade, but capitalism is a regime characterized first and foremost by society being organized around the interests of the capital-holding class, the first of which is the preservation of the situation in which society is organized around the interests of that class. The reasons companies are put on the Entity List is because they are broadly seen as a threat (long-term or immediate) to the continuation of that regime. That’s what the “foreign policy and national security interests” that form the official basis of the Entity List ultimately, generally, boil down to, in one way or another.

(They don’t always boil down to that, because why the US is basically a capitalist system, it is not purely one, and even in a more pure capitalist regime, individual influential decision-makers may have other interests that they act on besides the implementation and preservation of capitalism that end up getting reflected in policy.)

jameslk• 1 month ago

The common thread here is that it is China. Before the 2010s and earlier, the US wasn't so concerned about China, but ever since then, China has been a big US concern for it being a technology and military rival

e.g. the Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security Issues Posed by Chinese Telecommunications Companies Huawei and ZTE report from 2012:

https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:rm226yb7473/Huawei-ZT...

From that point forward, that concern has only grown. So you can view these actions as screaming "we were only for the free market until there was no competition" but if you want to genuinely know the answer to your question, the publicly stated concern is "China is a national security threat"

hereme8886• 1 month ago

DeepSeek rose to fame through stolen IP from U.S., and created shell companies to bypass U.S. law. Typical CCP-inspired behavior. The free world needs protection from abusers.

I'm sure there's a ton of other abuses they've committed as they race to become China's preferred LLM.

janalsncm9• 1 month ago

Free Market vs. planned economy was always mostly talking points, not a consistent ideology imo.

Even during the Cold War, American farms were heavily subsidized. The abundant supermarkets were not a product of free markets, they were a propaganda piece.

Today the US is pretty far from being a free market. Tax deductions are subsidies. Industry subsidies fund things on the front end, and bailouts are essentially subsidies after the fact.

And on top of that there are plenty of (good and bad) regulations which distort the market. For example it is illegal to import foreign insulin even if it would be cheaper. In most parts of US metro areas it is illegal to build multifamily housing.

fearmerchant• 1 month ago

The USA is not a suicide pact. We do need to consider national interests from time to time.

torginus2• 1 month ago

How does that even work? If Z.ai wants to buy lets say GPUs for AI training, what's stopping them from going to a local reseller? Its not even circumventing the rules, its the natural thing to do.

For that matter, does (only) NVIDIA make datacenter cards? When I buy a gaming card, I dont buy from NVIDIA, I buy from an integrator, like Gigabyte, who work with a company like Foxconn to make the cards.

jacobgkau• 1 month ago

The GamersNexus documentary (https://youtu.be/1H3xQaf7BFI) on the semi-underground GPU trade in China, while a little amateurish in terms of depth and general atmosphere, is an interesting watch and may answer some of your questions.

Basically, those export controls make GPUs more expensive for affected parties in China, but don't effectively stop them from being acquired or used over there.

janalsncm9• 1 month ago

The export restrictions only apply to certain GPU models, which are the more recent powerful ones used for training tasks. So the H100, B100 etc. are banned along with 4090, 5090.

Nvidia has downgraded chips that aren’t banned. H100 is banned, H800 is allowed. A100 is banned, A800 is allowed. But the sale has a tariff attached.

That’s all how it’s supposed to work. In practice companies probably circumvent the restrictions.

re-thc2• 1 month ago

How does that even work? If Z.ai wants to buy let's say GPUs for AI training, what's stopping them from going to a local reseller?

In theory, the whole chain has to comply. And if you don't you get fined etc. So the local reseller would risk not be able to resell.

pranavj• 1 month ago

Good context. And it shows the limit of this kind of control: the model at the top of the open-weights index this week comes from a lab already on that list, and that changes nothing about whether I can run it. Once weights are on Hugging Face the download doesn't care about an Entity List. Chip export controls bite. Weight controls mostly can't.

Havoc2• 1 month ago

The whole thing seems like nonsensical.

Their website literally has chinese characters on it even in english mode and everyone under the sun including crappy money talk show hosts know them as the chinese player that undercut western players. It's not exactly a secret.

You'd think anyone with two brain cells and confidential data could apply some judgement of their own...

dakolli5• 1 month ago

I trust Chinese companies with my data far more than American companies.

Havoc2• 1 month ago

Not sure I'd go that far but I do use them almost exclusively for my coding on the basis that it is an acceptable trade-off. Far cheaper and my shitty apps are really not that valuable as training data

hsuduebc25• 1 month ago

I have quite similiar stance, mostly because China usually intervenes much less than US in here. Their interest is primarily elsewhere.

inigyou25• 1 month ago

They collect more spy data and do more with it, but none of it directly affects me since they don't extradite from my country or share with my country's police.

Elzair2• 1 month ago

To give credit where credit is due, it is good that the Trump administration has not avidly played these stupid export control games. They tend to do little except hurt open collaboration; I remember when all open source cryptography had to be developed outside the US due to ITAR.

Filligree• 1 month ago

I don’t have the emoji handy, so just imagine the most savagely doubtful-looking emoticon that anyone has ever made.

Elzair2• 1 month ago

It is very possible that Trump and his cronies are just too incompetent to do that. In this one particular aspect (i.e. open source) I prefer having a stupid enemy than a "smart" enemy.

jonathanstrange2• 1 month ago

IMHO, models by US companies are the biggest security risk so I'm fine with using models on this "blacklist."

trunnell2• 1 month ago

Why?

jonathanstrange2• 1 month ago

Because they siphon off data to US intelligence, and if you claim they don't, you couldn't possibly know because the CLOUD Act can mandate them to do so without telling you or allowing you to admit it. Of course, if you're in the US this doesn't matter but for the rest of the world it does.

dvduval• 1 month ago

Part of the security risk also is the number of different models. I’ve been tempted to try some other models, but how many do I want to give access to SSH or even my repo? Obviously there are ways to work with this, but it’s gonna run through some people‘s heads.

verdverm• 1 month ago

Buy access to the open models from a single US vendor like https://fireworks.ai

One company, multiple models, Fireworks is the fasts at making the models available (had GLM-5.2 before the other three we are evaluating)

mananaysiempre2• 1 month ago

So... anybody who was hoping for CXMT (or YMTC) to maybe cause RAM or flash prices to maybe drop, maybe just a bit, pretty please, can go pound sand? (YMTC of course is already on the Entity List.)

reisse• 1 month ago

They probably will, but not for US customers.

arjie• 1 month ago

It’s a fairly liquid global market. I find it hard to believe that DRAM manufacturers will be able to sustain a premium if prices drop ex-US.

walterbell• 1 month ago

US. has held off adding.. memory chipmaker CXMT

Since CXMT was _not_ blacklisted, this is good for global RAM supply.

mananaysiempre2• 1 month ago

Not thus far, but I doubt one ever gets off this kind of chopping block once on it, so it seems to be merely a matter of time. It’ll probably take a year or two for CXMT to start producing consumer DDR5 in higher densities, if they even plan to bother, so I wouldn’t bet against a motivated lobbyist getting the axe to swing in the interim.

MaxPock• 1 month ago

Becoming such a sore loser. Historians will probably look this as the most shameful period of the American empire.

jtbayly• 1 month ago

Because they have held off on adding these companies to the list in order to avoid increasing tensions with China?

ETA from the first paragraph of the article: "The U.S. has held off... to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing."

looksjjhg• 1 month ago

did you just came out of under a rock? lol

kasey_junk• 1 month ago

Gonna skip over the chattel slavery and native genocide in future histories?

throwway120385• 1 month ago

Or that time that we parked an army on the Rio Grande because a bunch of people from the US decided to settle in the Mexican territory of Texas? That was a whole thing and the President of the US at the time, James K. Polk, ran on a platform of "Manifest Destiny" -- that the US should span "from sea to shining sea." There were a whole host of other countries with interest in that territory, not to mention the Indian tribes who would be displaced by that policy. The US has had a lot of dark periods in our history, and we shouldn't let those periods displace us from the moral certainty we derive from the Declaration of Independence and things like The Bill of Rights.

CamperBob22• 1 month ago

Yes, because we weren't an empire then. At the time Trump befouled our country, Pax Americana was a thing. We have voluntarily walked back from that position of moral and strategic leadership.

In that regard, history offers few precedents to learn from. Most countries have to be physically attacked to suffer the kind of damage that American voters are inflicting on themselves.

marknutter2• 1 month ago

Yeah, and that time we sacrificed nearly 1 million of our own citizens to end slavery.

antonvs3• 1 month ago

In the 1990s, web browser SSL encryption was export restricted, classified as a munition because it involved cryptography. That was under Clinton.

For all the current admin's insane, ridiculous, corrupt, and criminal flaws, it's not clear to me how much of this particular issue is just the US government doing what it's always done, knee-jerk react to tech it doesn't understand by passing stupid laws.

toasty2282• 1 month ago

the American empire.

When the dust settles it won't even be a single page in history books, my local bakery is older than the "american empire"

m00dy• 1 month ago

do you live in France ? :D

chadgpt32• 1 month ago

Is it still an empire?

trunnell2• 1 month ago

What an amazing achievement by America's adversaries.

The Trump administration lists Anthropic as a security risk and kneecaps its best model, despite the fact that compared to the other frontier US labs Anthropic is more transparent, more safety-oriented, frequently honest to a fault, and is clearly acting with patriotic intent.

Meanwhile, the same administration is hesitating to counter certain Chinese companies' efforts of industrial-scale theft and sabotage due to a fear of angering the CCP!

This administration has it exactly backwards. 4.5 months until election day, 7 months until the next Congress is sworn in.

mcbuilder2• 1 month ago

I've always found this line of reasoning troubling and uninformed.

Chinese models first of all can be hosted on your own hardware, I'd argue they are way more transparent than US companies, by well releasing stuff.

Second, the "smoking gun" of DeepSeek training off Claude isn't as bad as you may think, and the amount of tokens was deemed trivial. Did you also know that if you asked Claude's it's name in Chinese it would respond as "DeepSeek" until just a few months ago until they patched it?

Third, I find it a little hypocritical to call out Chinese for "industrial-scale" theft when anyone could create Studio Ghibli style image gen photos. How could they do that unless US companies trained on copyrighted works.

Chinese are just innovating faster at this point, DeepSeek V4 is an actual technological advancement (KV Cache compression) more than a cheap clone.

The administration does have it backwards, but IMO it's more them playing into the big tech companies plans (of course they have their favorites) instead of actually investing in education, and research like the Chinese do.

Freedom2• 1 month ago

I wonder about your last point. Certainly there's an aspect of education that Asia values more, however by the US own metrics, they are number 1 in terms of education outcomes.

Gormo• 1 month ago

Chinese models first of all can be hosted on your own hardware, I'd argue they are way more transparent than US companies, by well releasing stuff.

US-based companies release open-source models too. Gemma and Granite, for example.

resters• 1 month ago

It's not surprising that Trump is as bad as he is at many of these things, but what is surprising is that he's worshiped by his supporters.

l5870uoo9y• 1 month ago

Is DeepSeek really behaving different than other Chinese companies? Intellectual theft is ongoing and has been ongoing for decades. Besides security risks and foul play, it is impressive by just how much DeepSeek undercuts OpenAI and Claude. DeepSeek charges $0.87 per million output tokens compared to $50 for Fable and $30 for GPT-5.5.

hidelooktropic• 1 month ago

Especially for fable, that's not a fair comparison.

theplumber3• 1 month ago

Can you keep a straight face when you say IP theft while OpenAI and Claude have their entire business based on IP theft?

adamtaylor_132• 1 month ago

This is a commonly-repeated trope. Full of all the emotional zeal of AI Doomerism, but no accompanying evidence.

hereme8886• 1 month ago

I believe OP is talking at the national wealth and technology level: China stole from the U.S. (again). So the U.S. moves to protect American companies.

Levitz4• 1 month ago

Yes. For all the concerns about IP theft there can be on OpenAI or Claude, there's not even concern when it comes to Chinese companies since it's fully expected that it's a lost cause. Has been for decades.

kmeisthax• 1 month ago

I don't think we should pay any AI lab for their """work""" until they start paying consenting data subjects for their data. Given this, China comes off less like a thief and more like Robin Hood.

Or, to put it in 2000s terms: Anthropic is the guy selling bootleg CD-Rs of MP3s they downloaded from Grokster[0]. Should we give a shit about their livelihood when people figure out about Gnutella? No. Knowledge is a commons, and Anthropic is one of the biggest threats to the knowledge commons in recent memory.

[0] Not to be confused with the AI lab.

user439282• 1 month ago

I see no problem paying Anthropic or any other AI lab for the services they provide.

What I take issue with is when they try to block competition and lament that others use their model outputs for training.

matheusmoreira5• 1 month ago

Intellectual theft

No such thing.

WarmWash5• 1 month ago

If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their models.

The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. Which will also be defended because "I would never trust an American Lab".

miroljub2• 1 month ago

As a European, I trust Chinese AI providers more than American. Cloud act did it for me.

WarmWash5• 1 month ago

The chinese providers are just the CCP. They don't even need a cloud act...

tranceylc• 1 month ago

Canadian, and I also agree. It’s hard to avoid but I try not to use any American service or data storage.

villish• 1 month ago

Both China and the US can compel businesses to hand over data. There is no reason to trust any service that doesn't have strong built in privacy.

c03• 1 month ago

Same

vzcx• 1 month ago

As an American, I trust Chinese AI providers more than American.

uberex• 1 month ago

I trust them as a cloud less than US but don't completely trust US.

inigyou25• 1 month ago

China has something equivalent but as usual, it's harder for their spying to affect you. For now.

deer6• 1 month ago

I spoke with a high up fella in a uk firm - same thing - trusting china more. Couldn’t believe it when he said.

Americans you wanted isolation - you’re gonna get it eventually!

beepbooptheory• 1 month ago

I understand it's supposed to be obvious to all of us, but maybe just for fun, can you follow through? What is the next step in the nefarious plan?

cedarseagull• 1 month ago

Not OP, but IMO the Chinese are waging economic warfare by "commodifying the competition". US VC's and equity are massively invested in AI being very very profitable and as soon as it's not that becomes garbage debt on a balance sheet, and a lot of it. When money is invested it's expected to make a return. When a few people make bad investments they lose their bag, when many many people all make the same bad investment, you get a nasty recession. When the US goes into recession China is more emboldened to pursue their agenda because policy makers are distracted by shoring up support at home and not as interested in expanding their power abroad.

varispeed• 1 month ago

Funny that Europe starts to become China, just without the manufacturing and growth. I can see why people like them.

FuckButtons• 1 month ago

It’s not like this is a new tactic, china has been very successful at wiping out competition by undercutting them using state subsidies in many sectors of the economy.

betaby• 1 month ago

wiping out competition by undercutting them using state subsidies

The same tactic is in the USA. Like every new AI datacenter has ~10 tax waiver + explicit subsidies + favorable loans, etc, etc.

PunchyHamster• 1 month ago

I feel like it's less "defend china" but more "don't wanna have US have monopoly on it"

impalallama• 1 month ago

The smallest violin in the world for Sam Altman, and Musk

lelanthran2• 1 month ago

If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their models.

Right, and if "The West" wants people to defend them, they better get in on the free action too.

In fact, they have no choice - tokens are soon going to be a commodity, if they aren't already. Most everyone is going to be happy paying 1/20th of the cost for 80% of the value.

Oh, yeah, before I forget, hear the worlds smallest violin, playing for those token suppliers in "The West" whose repeatedly stated goal is to replace human knowledge workers...

bashtoni2• 1 month ago

I think the next step is for China to start selling Huawei (and other) GPUs around the world, because everyone appreciates the risk of giving either of the two superpowers their data. The US is no longer in a position to pressure other countries to bad imports from Chinese companies.

This is the beginning end of the hyperscaler era, not a shift from US hyperscalers to Chinese hyperscalers. Taking Nvidia's extremely lucrative market is the goal.

kyboren• 1 month ago

Software ecosystem aside, their hardware is inferior to NVDA/TSMC's and will remain so. And even if it wasn't, China just doesn't have the fab capacity to both meet domestic demand and export enough to hurt demand for NVDA.

gypsy_boots2• 1 month ago

It's funny how you can look at obscenely overvalued Western AI companies, with capex's that are unsustainable, and along comes a system which pokes a gaping hole in this model, and the response is "Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!"

Perhaps the question should instead be "Why are these Western AI companies getting insane valuations on dubious ROI, and how can these Chinese models run on a fraction of the infrastructure?"

thinkingtoilet• 1 month ago

"Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!"

I feel like that is way over simplified. I do not trust the American government. I do not trust the Chinese government. As an American, I believe the Chinese government has a longer and broader history of stealing intellectual property and far less checks and balances than the American government. The current American administration will be gone soon and maybe we can get some sanity back at some point. Overall, I trust my data in America more than China and I think that's reasonable. I am not naive. I'm aware of all the problems with my country and am quite vocal about it. In fact, I think it would be naive to think that the Chinese government won't have complete access to everything that goes through a Chinese server.

We are in full agreement on your second point.

winwang• 1 month ago

Not saying you're doing this specifically, but I'd be careful with thinking that "company" in China means the same as "company" in America (or in the West more generally).

skippyboxedhero5• 1 month ago

Because the revenue of Chinese AI companies is small. Anthropic's annual run rate is $50bn, z.ai's is $500m.

mlboss• 1 month ago

The main cost is training the first version of model. It is very easy to just train the copy cat model based on the output of another model.

Levitz4• 1 month ago

It's funny how you can look at obscenely overvalued Western AI companies, with capex's that are unsustainable, and along comes a system which pokes a gaping hole in this model, and the response is "Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!"

The only way this is funny is if you are completely oblivious to how China usually operates.

UncleOxidant• 1 month ago

One thing is that many of these Chinese companies have had to do more with less due to technology export restrictions. Doing more with less is not something that the big US AI companies think about much. The Chinese models are apparently much more compute and energy efficient.

ge962• 1 month ago

If they had encrypted LLM compute then in theory wouldn't matter who/what is running it

inigyou25• 1 month ago

Well they don't, and nobody has any idea how to build that, so why even mention it

petercooper• 1 month ago

The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers.

Step one of this was perhaps DeepSeek's incredibly low cache hit pricing ($0.0036/M) which no-one else seems to be able to match.

AnonymousPlanet• 1 month ago

get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers.

These open weights models are also hosted outside of the US and China. That's a very important difference.

sp5272• 1 month ago

Found the late-stage OAI/Anthropic bagholder lmao

CamperBob22• 1 month ago

Yes, they have been coming out of the woodwork like borer beetles. Not exactly subtle.

azan_• 1 month ago

I'm sorry but USA no longer has any moral superiority over China.

dana-s• 1 month ago

Talking with an American trying to sell me on "don`t use deepseek because of moral reasons" really made me much more invested in China.

sergiotapia• 1 month ago

These bastards already prevent me from buying a BYD car, and a xiaomi phone, and they are adamant about me not using a chinese AI model. I hope they do not succeed.

dryarzeg4• 1 month ago

Well, I guess you can use a third-party provider, maybe even the US-based one. At least, you can do this at the moment of this writing...

cwel5• 1 month ago

Ok I'll bite: what is the obvious thing I'm supposed to be getting from your ellipses?

are you implying there is a US-based, third-party provider of xiaomi devices, BYD cars?

or are you just referring to hosted providers of those AI models?

chadgpt32• 1 month ago

I am using a Xiaomi phone. The hardware is fine, the camera is very good compared to the average, the software absolutely sucks, bootloader unlocking is not possible and it comes full of spyware and adware that you can't disable.

jekbao• 29 days ago

Hard agree.

neves• 1 month ago

USA is blacklisting all Chinese companies

mark_l_watson• 1 month ago

Why would my country blacklist DeepSeek? Perhaps crazy lunacy like: "Your product is too good and too inexpensive: consumers like US companies and individuals need to pay more for services."

memonkey• 1 month ago

Yes, but they won't say that. Instead they will say _too Chinese, too communist, too national security-y_

aurareturn• 1 month ago

They usually say it has "ties" to the Chinese military. Meanwhile, every big tech from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Anthropic, and a ton of smaller corporations directly supply the US military.

hsuduebc25• 1 month ago

I'm interested if this is a tactic from Chinese side to undermine competition by subsidizing this price dumping.

sinuhe693• 1 month ago

How it’s price dumping if they give you the model to run free on your own hardware? Follow this logic, are not all OSS price dumping and should be blocked as well? I remember Steve Ballmer once called for that!

I’m pretty sure the digital lords like that proposal a lot. Not so much about the serfs themselves, though.

CookieCrisp• 1 month ago

Isn't that effectively what they've done in regards to chinese cars?

_pdp_• 1 month ago

Lol. That will do it.

Fable is getting more attention now precisely because it was taken down. Do the same to DeepSeek and Z.ai, and you will not strengthen your AI labs. You will likely achieve the opposite.

gosub100• 1 month ago

Wait, can't this be reduced to:

"American AI is already trillions of USD underwater, so let's use US gov to build us a moat by making competition illegal"

glerk• 1 month ago

So this is the other side of banning American models for non-Americans? And how exactly do they plan on enforcing all of this? Great Firewall of America?

This is a complete joke. The malicious clowns behind this should be removed from power and prevented from ever holding any position of power in any form of governance system.

ibejoeb• 1 month ago

how exactly do they plan on enforcing all of this?

Video selfies and government document upload on hardware attested phones, of course.

matheusmoreira5• 1 month ago

They're probably going to ban GPU exports to China. Which will of course accelerate the development of their own GPUs. More products for us.

mtoner23• 1 month ago

trump just undid the gpu export to china to help jensen make money

azinman22• 1 month ago

China is already going as hard as they can on their own GPUs. When has availability of non-Chinese tech in China meant China didn't ultimately come up with homegrown replacements?

karunamurti• 1 month ago

China already produced their first graphic card that got Microsoft WHQL certification.

Is it competitive enough? Probably no. Is there a software ecosystem for Chinese hardware yet? Probably no. But you know it will come soon.

azinman22• 1 month ago

You're aware that many countries are blacklisted from trade with the US already, along with certain segments of existing companies. It just means that enforcement comes with contracts, law, banking systems, etc.

worik2• 1 month ago

Until they scantion Brazil

It can happen to anyone

usernomdeguerre• 1 month ago

And how exactly do they plan on enforcing all of this? Great Firewall of America?

That's what Cloudflare will be for.

incompatible3• 1 month ago

Banning American models for non-Americans seems like a big reduction of the potential customers for American chatbot companies.

0xpgm• 1 month ago

It's likely the elected officials know nothing about AI the technology.

Depends on who has their ears in terms creating policies around technology.

tychez• 1 month ago

The same way you can't just open a bank account anonymously. It seems inevitable to me that this is going to end up with a KYC/AML style digital online ID.

Without that you are not using Claude 10. It would not be shocking at all at some level of capability that running open source models anonymously is made a crime.

To pretend there is not huge issues with a laissez faire attitude as these models progress I think is intellectually dishonest and performative.

ddxv2• 1 month ago

The US is slowly becoming more like China. From talks of nationalizing companies to make US state owned entities to banning foreign competition. It's just so strange how you become the thing you fear.

andrekandre• 1 month ago

  > It's just so strange how you become the thing you fear.

how does the saying go? "when you obsess over your enemy, you become your enemy"?

cnity• 1 month ago

It's a slow motion motorcycle crash[0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_fixation

ranyume• 1 month ago

The CCP would never dream of giving the state's control to tech CEOs.

inigyou25• 1 month ago

You just need to think outside the box: the CCP is big tech, not Congress. The CCP (big tech in the analogy) would never dream of giving control to congress.

tyrust2• 1 month ago

talks of nationalizing companies

What is this referring to?

cisrockandroll2• 1 month ago

https://apnews.com/article/bernie-sanders-ai-public-ownershi...

ddxv2• 1 month ago

I was referring to the US government buying a 10% stake in Intel and the ideas being floated of further investment in Intel and other companies by the Trump admin.

deaux4• 1 month ago

The US is slowly becoming more like China.

Hah, if only. Then at least it would see some of the benefits too. Instead, it's making sure to only copy all of the downsides, with zero of the upsides.

phendrenad22• 1 month ago

This is the kind of flippant remark that does the gravity of the situation a disservice. Nobody burns witches out of the blue one day, they do it because they figured out that burning witches makes everyone afraid to do anything that could be remotely construed as witchcraft, and they all start being good little church attendees.

So I hate to break it to you but you're not fighting powers-that-be who are just bumbling around and decided to randomly be like China one day. You're fighting powers-that-be who did the analysis and decided that being like China was the right way to go, for the good of everyone, and they backed it up with math and logic. You're going to need math and logic to convince them otherwise.

ngc248• 1 month ago

Bro, you have "grass is greener on the other side" syndrome. China is a totalitarian state not comparable to the US. Take this from a non-US citizen. There maybe some backsliding or ppl may think things are worsening in the US, but US citizens always have the power to make things right, coz they are free and they can bear arms.

throwburn2026053• 1 month ago

In some ways its hard to differentiate between big tech and the national security complex, where execs are being sworn into the military

https://www.army.mil/article/286317/army_launches_detachment...

Tangurena2• 1 month ago

I think America is becoming more like Russia, with a dictator who eliminates any billionaire who disagrees with His Dictatorship. The American groups who want to go back to the "glory years" of the 1950s are equivalent to the Russian groups who want to go back to the "glory years" of the Soviet Union.

MisterTea• 1 month ago

This is exactly where we are headed: a has-been that sold itself down a river to a bunch of kleptocrats who only are about themselves and their sycophants.

throwaway274484• 1 month ago

I wish we were becoming like china; it feels a lot more like big brother from 1984.

chatmasta• 1 month ago

Does anyone have the actual list of 100? Maybe I missed it but I don’t see the link or list in the article.

philipwhiuk• 1 month ago

Providing the whole list would probably allow the government to identify the person who leaked it to Reuters.

apatheticonion9• 1 month ago

I use DeepSeek every day (via VSCode Insiders and Zed Editor). It's very affordable and, while it's slightly behind Claude (not sure how far behind Fable), it suits my working style well. I'm not using unsupervised multi-agent workflows and don't need a library of skills files - I'm writing most of the code and leaning on AI to help with mundane tasks - like;

- generating types for APIs

- generating boilerplate based on existing code

- improving existing code (adding error handling, timeouts, things like that)

- Writing SQL repository boilerplate / queries

- Creating implementations against hand written tests

- Helping me understand and implement APIs from third party libraries

- Writing documentation

I've spent like $2 in the last month and have used over 100 million tokens.

It's doubled my productivity and unlocked work that I could not have done before.

As an Australian, I'm not sure that I care about the safety of my data when it comes to LLMs. US companies already stole scores of data to train their models on and it's hard to imagine they suddenly grew some integrity. I'll care when regulators step in, until then it's out of my control so I'll just use the best price-to-productivity product available.

cg5280• 1 month ago

I second this. I’ve been using it a lot (with OpenCode) for personal projects. It’s intelligent enough at a tiny fraction of the cost of Claude or Codex.

proxysna• 1 month ago

I've been using deepseek for some development at home and it is really good for the price. It is at the point where i am ok with using it as a tool that i can rely on and not an expensive gadget with flaky uptimes.

globalnode• 1 month ago

Using laws to ban competitors is just economic warfare thats all. Its got nothing to do with "national security", thats just the reason they give us normies. You should be safe in Australia since they actually need to be friends with China.

p-e-w• 1 month ago

What? Every country has the right to freely decide which companies are permitted to operate under its jurisdiction, and exercising that right isn’t “warfare” of any kind.

kingforaday• 1 month ago

You should be safe in Australia since they actually need to be friends with China.

As a non-Australian, I enjoyed very much reading about Australia in a book by Tim Marshall titled "The Power of Geography". I didn't quite realize just how vulnerable they become with China's ambitions and expanse in the South Pacific due to their reliance on vital sea lanes for trade with its Asian partners. After reading that book, I can appreciate your comment much more.

re-thc2• 1 month ago

Using laws to ban competitors is just economic warfare thats all. Its got nothing to do with "national security"

Economic safety is 1 angle of national security. They're not "wrong".

fraXis• 1 month ago

How are you accessing their API? Through OpenRouter, or direct? Are you using DeepSeek v4 Pro? $2 seems a lot cheaper than my own experience accessing them through OpenRouter for over 100 million tokens, but I am using OpenRouter to access v4 pro.

fc417fc8027• 1 month ago

Pro is substantially more expensive than flash. In addition, there's wide variance in price with DeepSeek themselves providing the cheapest tokens last I checked (but they train on them). Caching policy also varies by provider. TTL can be as low as 5 minutes or as high as 24 hours and reading from the cache might or might not reset the timer. Whether or not you get a hit makes (IIRC) a 10x (edit: it's actually 50x) price difference in the case of DeepSeek themselves.

apatheticonion9• 1 month ago

I am using Flash and accessing the API directly via vscode insiders and occasionally Zed (it's buggy but I keep coming back to it because I want it to succeed).

Unless you need enterprise multi-model management, I don't see the point in OpenRouter as it just adds cost overhead and you can just self-host an open router alternative (LiteLLM, Bifrost, etc). Running an LLM gateway locally is kind of nice as it allows you to normalize your configurations against your internal gateway - but I haven't really needed to.

crazylogger• 1 month ago

Cache hit rate dominates your total cost calculation for long agent session, and it largely depends on the provider. Deepseek's native deployment is probably much better than third party in this regard. For v4 pro it's a whopping >100x price difference between normal input vs. cached input tokens.

cedws2• 1 month ago

Ensure you're hitting the DeepSeek provider via OpenRouter - they have the massive cached tokens discount. If you're hitting any other provider you're paying an order of magnitude more.

Bnjoroge4• 1 month ago

Deepseek direct is atleast 2x cheaper than other providers serving it. Maybe their caching strategy is just significantly better or they’re subsidizing api pricing. I think it’s the former. $2 is closer to 50 million v4pro tokens in my experience

godelski6• 1 month ago

  > As an Australian, I'm not sure that I care about the safety of my data when it comes to LLMs. US companies already stole scores of data

I'm not sure I understand this. I'm not defending the US, but isn't your data being in more hands worse?

Also, isn't Australia in a more contentious situation with China? Them being more allied with the US and all? Not to mention the whole nuclear sub issue. Having data stolen is shitty either way but isn't data taken by an adversarial country a worse situation?

stephen_g• 1 month ago

Most Aussies aren't really worried about China... China remains our largest trading partner, and polling shows less than half of Australians think the AUKUS alliance (which includes the nuclear subs) makes our region safer.

est• 1 month ago

isn't your data being in more hands worse?
Having data stolen is shitty

Fun fact: Deepseek can be hosted by third parties even yourself.

florkbork• 1 month ago

Re Australia vs China

https://youtu.be/sgspkxfkS4k?si=JgnhenF0qeTZXeGS basically explains the situation.

While having data/code stolen isn't ideal, there is a certain point where you need to assume it's already out there. There's actually more probability of harm from shady US companies imo, because people are less suspicious about data sovereignty

technion• 1 month ago

As an Australian.. politically I need to worry about business data touching China. It will come up at a Risk Advisory Committee meeting as a serious issue.

In actual personal practice, no. China having my data presents no actual impact to me, America will do things that impact me.

hodgehog116• 1 month ago

Historically speaking, the US might even be a larger risk to Australia than China is. The US alliance goes back a long way, and so does the opposition to US influence. Since the Whitlam government, MPs are generally fearful of US retaliation, rendering much of our politics hostage to US influence. Of course, some PMs have openly embraced the US so this feeling isn't universal. But many of our issues are directly tied to the US.

China has been far more beneficial to Australia by comparison, with the downside being the encroaching influence of CCP propaganda. Many of our strengths are tied to our relationships with Southeast Asia.

Paul Keating has famously declared US as an "aggressive ally", "our colonial masters", AUKUS as our "worst international decision", and that "our future is in Southeast Asia". This was under Biden too.

So the situation is much more complicated, and the feelings on the ground right now is that the US are not our friends (of course, the CCP is not great either).

apatheticonion9• 1 month ago

If I spoke freely about how I feel about the US right now and the direct personal impact of policies implemented by the recent administration, I'd be denied entry into the country to visit friends later this year.

It is inconsequential if the US or China have my data, both will misuse it and I am powerless to protect myself from that fact.

Not using LLMs presents a bigger threat to my career than protecting my data.

sandworm101• 1 month ago

China is not digging through my social media in order to find a reason to cut my grant funding. China isnt going to pull me over for speeding in montana only to examine my phone to see whether i am maga enough to get off with a warning. And china isnt at o'hare security scanning for anyone with skin darker than freshly fallen snow. China may be evil, but it is a far away evil that doesnt have a physical impact on my day to day. The other evil is much closer to home. Even if it is not the biggest, the crocodile closest to the canoe is always more concerning than the one still on the bank.

fjdjshsh• 1 month ago

Latinamerican here. When you talk about "adversarial country" I think of the USA (they can kidnap a president, kill people on boats without a trial, etc) and not China. YMMV for different regions.

prmoustache• 1 month ago

USA is an adversarial country to everyone in 2026.

zrn9003• 1 month ago

Also, isn't Australia in a more contentious situation with China?

China does not run 'rendition flights' to kidnap other countries' citizens and hold them in gitmo style prisons for decades. China cannot compel and does not compel random countries to extradite foreign citizens to China to persecute them and lock them up. Guess who does.

hodgehog116• 1 month ago

In terms of price-to-productivity, nothing will beat DeepSeek right now. For what you have described, all of the existing frontier models will perform well (probably about the same even).

If you expanded the list to very hard research tasks, Fable was so far ahead of the others that it doesn't even deserve debate. If you are a researcher doing something involving scientific computation or mathematics that wasn't rejected by the guard rails, and you were using Fable, that week was probably your most productive week ever. A couple of my PhD students effectively finished their current projects in that period by getting Fable to chew on it for 30 hours straight (not sure how I feel about that).

Cakez0r• 1 month ago

Mimo 2.5 pro is the best intelligence / dollar

steelframe• 1 month ago

Makes me wonder what the value of a PhD is.

josephg• 1 month ago

This was my experience too. I asked fable to implement a (quite complex, novel) CRDT engine. It did fantastic work for the 3 days I had access to it. The spec it wrote is exactly what I want. It used prototypes and examples to figure out some hard problems and answer a lot of complex design questions. Claude Opus has been lumbering along over the last week trying to turn what it did into a useful library. As far as I can tell, by trying to vibe together pieces of work fable did without understanding it properly. Opus makes mistakes constantly, misunderstands the spec, and it makes terrible engineering decisions. Earlier today it claimed it proved something was impossible. I asked it to think that through and it immediately backtracked and apologized. Was it right then, or is it right now? Claude has no clue.

I'm kicking myself for not using Fable more while I had it. Now that I've used fable, I'm not sure I even want opus any more. It might be more efficient in the medium term to just program everything myself until I have access to a similarly capable model.

I feel like Deepseek, opus, etc are only good at problems that have already been solved 100 times on github. They're like the iPhone 3G. Its exciting they exist at all. But subsequent versions make them seem like cheap junk.

gambiting3• 1 month ago

I'm an engine programmer in video games on a big project - recently I'm mostly just fixing bugs. And Fable has been absolutely phenomenal in those 2 days we had it lol. It was genuinely the first time I didn't really have to reproduce a bug to fix it - Fable was able to really understand the code and interconnections between the systems to reason why it might have happened and fix it. Opus really struggles with that in my experience, or it munches code for 2 hours only to come up with a completely wrong explanation, like, wrong if you think about it for more than 2 seconds. TBF I only had 2 days to play with fable, but it was incredible in that time - can't wait to have it back.

NicoJuicy2• 1 month ago

I have the feeling MiMo v2.5 Pro uses a lot less tokens and so a lot cheaper ( comparable pricepoint)

Rover222• 1 month ago

Developers claiming their valuable data was “stolen” to train models is so dramatic.

apatheticonion9• 1 month ago

I'd be fine if it cut both ways. It shouldn't be legal for works distributed by people under licenses that would prohibit derivative work whilst if I reverse engineered a Nintendo Switch 2 with an LLM I'd be sent to the underworld.

allarm• 1 month ago

Companies that claim downloading their shit is theft are so dramatic. Although the consequences are different. Your "argument" is immature.

grafmax• 1 month ago

IMO US vs Chinese data vacuuming is a false choice. One of the main benefits of these open weights models is that you can get the privacy and cost savings by hosting your own model in cloud infrastructure.

Open weights models are only 4.5 months behind closed weight ones.

The fact that US considers propping its flagship technology by blacklisting competitors demonstrates how small the US competitive advantage really is.

neuroelectron• 1 month ago

The USA has an entire economic system to financialize your personal data and obfuscate your privacy. China can just sniff on their citizens API Calls, and use that to distill models.

bjackman• 1 month ago

Hosting DeepSeek Pro yourself is gonna be wildly expensive though?

You have a wide choice of providers available, so if you can find one you trust you can get inference without data harvesting and it's still very cheap. But dedicated HW is insanely inefficient.

Opus estimates you can do it for $13k/month if you get committed pricing on the HW.

pbhjpbhj• 1 month ago

They could just be flagging that they're considering blacklisting as a way to get some more Trump coin sold or other bribes. Or indeed to get further money from USA companies - which way will Trump decide, only the numbers in his family's bank accounts can give us a clue.

flanked-evergl2• 1 month ago

US companies already stole scores of data to train their models on and it's hard to imagine they suddenly grew some integrity.

Can you be specific about what data of yours were stolen by who?

gazebo22• 1 month ago

Any text, code, image, video or audio they/anybody has ever uploaded to the public internet? Is this a real question?

cedws2• 1 month ago

I'm in favour of sending as much data as possible to DeepSeek for them to train on. I'd happily zip up everything useful I have and send it to them if they asked for it.

epolanski7• 1 month ago

I can second this. Deepseek is great for mundane work day tasks.

I use it via claude code, just pointing the api to deepseek.

It's also not a clear "Opus 4.8 >> DS 4 Pro", I've done 16 tasks in 4 days across the two, and while Opus was indeed on average better, both models performed well being able to handle most of my workload.

In fact DeepSeek was _significantly_ better on 3 task out of 16 and Opus was _significantly_ better only in 2 out of 16.

So why I still claim Opus 4.8 to be the winner? Because the few times that DS failed or got off the rails, it failed much harder and needed several prompts to be realigned on the actual tasks.

Another thing at which Deepseek is significantly behind is code reviewing. Opus is more intelligent/thorough, Deepseek will sometimes generate bogus or low quality feedback.

And the last thing at which Opus is better, period, is vibe coding. If you want to implement features end-to-end it handles ultracode flows quite better. I don't vibe code at work, but I do so with personal projects.

But the cost concern is real. I've spent sub 2$ in 5 days of work using DS 4 Pro, which is on average just 4 queries to Anthropic.

Give me a slightly better DS 4 (it is still in preview and training isn't finished) and I may ditch Anthropic for good.

Bnjoroge4• 1 month ago

Have you tried glm 5.2? It’s better than ds4pro and very close to opus4.6. Alot more expensive than ds4pro/mimo but significantly chesper than opus 4.6 for 90% of the quality

mctaylor• 1 month ago

The fact that America has yet to figure out the importance of soft power (and TRUST in particular) in the AI/information age is mind boggling to me.

The CLOUD act, FISA rulings, the Snowden leaks, and now the aggressive tech oligarch push to weaponize the unholy combination of AI, MAGA, and social media algorithms in an absurd and patently obvious attempt to impose (or maintain?) "world domination" seems likely to cement their downfall.

"Authoritarian" China's low-cost and open source approach looks downright democratic by comparison.

It seems increasingly clear to me that AI is forcing a reckoning in terms of how we interpret authority and control in light of new ways that information is evolving. The old political labels seem grossly insufficient to describe the present reality and the ones whining about "democracy", "freedom", and "liberal values" increasingly sound (and act) like bitter, out of touch old men desperately clinging onto a world that is rapidly outgrowing them.

Last time I checked, the closest approximation of liberal values are "liberty, equality, fraternity". They seem to think that "liberty" should only apply to them, "equality" is a threat to their consolidated power, and "fraternity" is something that should be weaponized to turn communities against one another to distract from the ways the oligarchs have been and continue to abuse and consolidate their power.

uf00lme• 1 month ago

You can thank the us gov for a list of companies to invest in.

worik2• 1 month ago

Damn, USA, you being foolish.

The world economy is not a zero sum gain, we all do better when we do better

Cooperate with China, love and cherish them.

Unlike us of European heritage, they are not imperialistic

Get over yourselves!

cisrockandroll2• 1 month ago

Oh yeah the Chinese Empire is not imperial… Dynasty Shymnasty!

noisy_boy• 1 month ago

Deepseek is awesome for home projects, I have used it quite a bit and the 10 bucks I loaded is yet to run out. Quality is close enough to Sonnet that with a bit of extra focus, I am not complaining.

h4kunamata• 1 month ago

US blacklist anything that does't agree with them, there is nothing new here.

amritanshuamar• 1 month ago

i was using google gemini earlier now using deepseek , v 4 pro is better. fast and strong coding.

b3ing• 1 month ago

At this rate, local llm will be banned. Hope we have the torrents and archives ready

gpt5• 1 month ago

Not really, and it distracts from the real cause. The ban is incentivized by where the data is going, not the use of models.

andrewstuart• 1 month ago

They need to blacklist all free foreign AI/LLM models because they are free competition which is against democratic capitalism.

danielovichdk• 1 month ago

This is purely politics and the only way to get back the trillions of dollars, Americans has invested in AI.

US government will point to Chinese models and companies, saying it is a risk - just as the west did with Huawei - making it a none choice for brainless corporate people to choose what the choir preach.

Pure politics

throwaw12• 1 month ago

"Free market", "free market", "free market"! When we are winning

"Tariffs", "bans", "national security", "ban, ban, ban"! When they are winning

Cute capitalism is ruling the US.

US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks

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