DeepSeek roundup: banned by governments, no guard rails, lied about its training costs

David Gerard

Feb. 8, 2025, 8:05 p.m.

Of course DeepSeek lied about its training costs, as we had strongly suspected. SemiAnalysis has been following DeepSeek for the past several months. High Flyer, DeepSeek’s owner, was buying Nvidia GPUs by the thousands as early as 2021. SemiAnalysis is “confident” that DeepSeek has put more than $500 million into GPUs alone, despite export controls. [SemiAnalysis]

The US is investigating whether DeepSeek is getting its Nvidia GPUs via Singapore. Gray market sales to China via Singapore are a well known phenomenon, and we’d be more surprised if DeepSeek hadn’t gotten GPUs this way. [Bloomberg, archive]

The DeepSeek app has been banned from use by government employees in Australia, South Korea, and Taiwan, and for NASA employees in the US, over fairly obvious security concerns about sending government data to China. [Guardian, archive; Al Jazeera]

DeepSeek basically doesn’t bother with guard rails on its content. Cisco researchers fed DeepSeek 50 malicious prompts used to test for “toxic content.” They found that DeepSeek didn’t screen any of them out. Cisco called this a “security risk,” which is not quite what the word “security” means — compare DeepSeek’s actual user data security issues. {Cisco]

Dario Amodei of Anthropic warns that DeepSeek doesn’t filter its output, and will give you “bioweapons-related information.” He then backtracked and said he wasn’t calling DeepSeek “literally dangerous” — but that it might be in the near future! So if you want an LLM that censors Chinese political content but nothing else, you know where to look. [TechCrunch]