Comment by neuronexmachina
7 days ago
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.
The order is limited to DeepSeek as a corporate entity and "implementations" means third party software that purchases and uses products directly from DeepSeek.
> For purposes of this Order, an individual or business is an "affiliated entity" or "affiliate" of DeepSeek AG if, directly or indirectly, either one controls or can control the other; or a third party controls or can control both.
This does not apply to open model weights, which are not a product or service, and does not apply to independent hosts of model weights if they have no affiliation with DeepSeek as defined.
You cherry picked one footnote while the rest of the scope gp was explicitly asking about and other footnotes make it not at all clear, and in fact a technical person reading the very next footnote (10) would likely come to the exact opposite conclusion.
> This Exclusion and Removal Order direct Federal civilian agencies⁸ to: (1) *exclude* DeepSeek, DeepSeek-affiliated entities⁹, and their products from civilian agency procurements,¹⁰ and (2) *remove* products provided by DeepSeek and DeepSeek entities, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations, from civilian agency information technology systems.¹¹
> ⁹ For purposes of this Order, an individual or business is an "affiliated entity" or "affiliate" of DeepSeek AG if, directly or indirectly, either one controls or can control the other; or a third party controls or can control both. See 48 C.F.R. § 2.101 (definition of "affiliates").
> ¹⁰ To include third party implementations of DeepSeek used to provide products and services civilian agencies.
> ¹¹ Pursuant to 41 U.S.C. § 1323(c)(5)(A)(i), orders issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security would apply to civilian "information and communications technology," as that term is defined by 41 U.S.C. § 1321(5).
> "implementations" means third party software that purchases and uses products directly from DeepSeek.
That's not obvious to me, and quoting a part of the order about affiliated entities doesn't explain it. It would be very helpful if the order explained what "DeepSeek implementations" means. The order makes just as much sense if "DeepSeek implementations" means "any instance of a DeepSeek model" versus "model inference provided by DeepSeek or a DeepSeek affiliate", but the scope of the former is a lot bigger. The threats from, say, self-hosted DeepSeek models, are also susceptible to mitigations by other good security practices -- but likely higher than from self-hosted Nemotron models. (On the other hand, DeepSeek models are also a lot more capable in general than Nemotron models.)
The legal language is important here. In this context "DeepSeek" is referring back to the corporate entity "Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd (DeepSeek)" and from a legal document interpretation perspective this is not disputable at all. So an "implementation" of DeepSeek must mean a third party product that uses a DeepSeek product.
If you read the justifications for the order, there are zero mentions of open weights data or associated risks, and everything focuses on the use of DeepSeek commercial products with regards to their being hosted in China. The only mention that maybe could apply is "The models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities." but this is followed with another reference to a DeepSeek commercial product: "Indeed, open-source security research has found that the DeepSeek iOS mobile application contains multiple critical vulnerabilities."
The findings that form the basis of the order make no claims or references to open weights data at all, and plainly focus entirely on DeepSeek commercial products, so any attempt to apply the order to open weights data used by non-DeepSeek affiliated inference providers has not basis at all.
8 replies →
that sounds like a directive that was written to be vague enough to scare any government contractor away from using deepseek for anything ever.
Hypothetically, if all companies just refused to ever develop anything for the government, what would the government do?
Invoke Defense Procurement and jail a bunch of CEOs so others fall in line?
Probably hire people to do it themselves. They are the government, after all.
Not going to happen because building for the suckers in government pays. Or rather overpays.
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Pay someone else to develop. Usually someone shows up because people need to make a living.
See Tennessee executions
Hypothetically, they will import people who will do it.
Would this include American models that where distilled from them? I'm thinking of the Anthropic models which respond as Deepseek when prompted in Chinese. More good news for OpenAI, I guess.
That’s not how it works. The training material in Chinese is more likely to mention DeepSeek. LLMs are not aware what model they are.
Of course the model doesn't know what model it is, hence Claude pretending to be deepseek. But whether they got that training content by proxy from the Chinese internet, or distilled directly from the model would not seem to matter for this law.
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That's exactly how it works.
Anthropic says that if a model says they are an Anthropic model, that's it, it's distilled from Anthropic. They even use that as a "proof" DeepSeek is distilling their models.
Or do you want to say the Anthropic PR department is a bunch of liars and scammers?
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What happens if Linux includes Deepseek code now? All dependencies are poisonous?
Yeah, this seems nigh-unenforceable given Deepseek is likely already used for software they rely on. Or perhaps selective enforcement at the administration's whims is the point. Par for the course.
Though I think we gotta take models seriously and have safeguards around them, this is not about national security. This about frontier labs freaking out after all that DeepSeek and other non US labs are pulling off lately.
I work for a bank, and local models are banned. I have been waiting for Opus 5.5 to be enabled, and it’s still being evaluated. Things take their time, models are evaluated, and risk assessed. There is nothing new here. And I am pretty much certain such practices have been in place in critical US agencies since a while.
A blanket ban is nothing more than a desperate attempt to delay the inevitable.
> what does that actually mean?
It means whatever they decide to enforce. The idea that the current administration considers itself constrained by the letter of any specific law or regulation (even its own) should be cold dead by now. But people still insist on treating with specifics out of habit I guess.
As others here are pointing out (somewhat obliquely, frustratingly), the Occam's explanation for this particular action is just that it's a solicitation for a bribe.
That's effectively banning all open source, since at this point it's hard to find an open source project that doesn't have at least a few lines of code produced using it :)
> could it even extend to software containing any code (or even library) that was written using DeepSeek?
Clearly yes.
And more. "Developed using" is not just included code.
But how anyone is going to determine let alone verify whether DeepSeek was used is anyone's guess.
Doesn't sound like the liability lies with the library maintainers, sounds up to the government agency to do their due diligence, but also sounds unenforceable as well
My interpretation was software vibecoded with DeepSeek models. Primarily through some aggregating harness like OpenCode or Pi