China defends DeepSeek after US ban of its AI from government systems - AP News

Monday brought a notice, Tuesday brought the reply, and the federal civilian IT estate in between got a homework assignment. The Department of Homeland Security says agencies should remove DeepSeek, its affiliated products, and third party products and services developed using DeepSeek, from their systems. Do savour that third clause. It is not a ban on an app; it is a ban on a family tree — and the family tree has been merrily forking on GitHub since DeepSeek began handing out DeepInfer to anyone with a pulse.

Note the verb, too. "Should remove" — not must, not shall, not "done by Friday or the CIO answers to a subcommittee." Should is the word you use about a colleague's spreadsheet with the wrong tab open. Somewhere a federal IT manager is building a spreadsheet of their own, trying to work out whether the procurement tool that quietly embedded a DeepSeek endpoint counts as "affiliated", "third party", or "please stop emailing me". Affiliated is doing a great deal of unexamined labour in that sentence, and the notice, made public on Monday, does not appear to have shipped with a map of the Western internet's quiet dependencies.

And then China hit back, which is the line everyone will quote. A sovereign government formally defending a startup's honour is a novelty — traditionally the startup defends itself while the government pretends the two have never been introduced. But the weights are out, the tooling is out, and every hobbyist fine-tune in a basement in Ohio is now, technically, a third party product developed using DeepSeek. You can pull a download; you cannot pull a file already sitting on laptops across the world. Which makes the defence the cheapest marketing budget in the industry — one superpower's IT department, naming the model that keeps it up at night.