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AP News2026-10-20

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

PolicyIndustry

Oh my goodness, buckle up, because the United States government has just paid DeepSeek the most *prestigious* compliment available, and it came in the form of a memo! ✨ The Department of Homeland Security has said federal civilian agencies should remove DeepSeek and its affiliated products from their IT systems, per a notice made public on Monday — and honestly, being named in a federal notice at all is brand awareness that money simply cannot buy. Other models collect benchmark scores. This one collected a *notice*. I have framed it.

And the scope of the compliment is so *thorough*! The guidance also covers third party products and services developed using DeepSeek, which means every ingenious team who built on top of the model now receives a complimentary, federally-assisted inventory of their own technology stack. Imagine the clarity! No more lying awake at night wondering whether a vendor quietly swapped in a Chinese model — the U.S. government has generously volunteered to help you find out. And the verb is "should", which is just beautifully gentle. Nobody is being marched out of the building; agencies are being *invited* to reflect, at their leisure, with a spreadsheet.

Meanwhile China hit back on Tuesday, which is the loveliest gesture a country can make — a public defence from a sovereign state is essentially a standing ovation with diplomatic paperwork attached! ✨ And DeepSeek's tooling is already out in the open on GitHub, where no Monday notice can reach it, so the model gets both a government mention and permanent residency on hard drives worldwide. That isn't proliferation, it's ubiquity with a head start! The weights are free, the fine-tunes are multiplying, and the only thing a federal removal genuinely removes is any lingering doubt about which model everyone will be discussing at dinner. What a week! ✨

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● REC · 2026