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

IP, Scraping, and “Illicit” Training

• Many see Anthropic’s complaint about DeepSeek scraping Claude as hypocritical, given US labs trained on massive web and book corpora without consent.
• Some argue outputs from LLMs should be fully legal to scrape and reuse, and ToS bans on this should be unenforceable to avoid entrenched monopolies.
• Others stress that ToS breaches and pirated datasets still matter legally and morally, even if everyone is “stealing from each other.”
• Disagreement over evidence: some say claims of OpenAI/Anthropic “IP theft” are overblown; others cite lawsuits, settlements, and verbatim memorization studies as proof.

US Policy, Entity Lists, and Protectionism

• Strong view that US actions (entity lists, export controls, potential DeepSeek blacklisting) are about protecting domestic AI incumbents and capital, not “safety.”
• Counterview: measures are framed as national security and industrial policy, especially in a broader “America vs China” tech rivalry.
• Some note Chinese AI labs already on the Entity List still ship top open-weight models, implying limited practical impact once weights are public.
• Debate over whether export controls on GPUs are meaningful or easily circumvented via third countries and gray markets.

Security, Sovereignty, and Whom to Trust

• Non‑US commenters often say they now distrust US clouds more than Chinese ones, citing the CLOUD Act and NSA-style collection.
• Others counter that Chinese firms are tightly tied to the state and should be assumed to serve CCP interests; US still seen as relatively more constrained by law.
• Several point out that open‑weights models can be self‑hosted in EU/US clouds, separating “Chinese model” from “Chinese server.”

Economics, Competition, and Industrial Strategy

• DeepSeek’s extremely low pricing is viewed as a potential “commoditize the complement” move that threatens US hyperscaler business models.
• Some suspect state support and deliberate price undercutting; others frame it as compute‑efficient engineering driven by China’s constrained access to high‑end chips.
• Large argument over protectionism: some want to block Chinese AI (and cars like BYD) to preserve domestic industry; others argue this entrenches uncompetitive incumbents.

Developer Experiences and Practical Use

• Multiple developers report using DeepSeek (especially Flash and v4 Pro) heavily for coding and documentation at a tiny fraction of Claude/OpenAI cost.
• Perceived quality: slightly behind top US frontier models on very hard tasks but “good enough” for everyday coding, making price/performance compelling.
• Many expect cheap, open‑weight models to erode the moat of closed US providers and shift value to hardware and self‑hosted deployments.