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>been obtained illegally.

PRC companies breaking US export control laws is legal (for PRC companies). Maybe they're trying to avoid US entity listing, lot's of PRC companies keep mum about growing capabilites to do so. But the mere fact Deepseek is publicizing means they're unlikely to care about the political heat that is coming and the ramifications. If anything, getting on US entity list probably locks in their employees with Deepseek on resume into PRC.






Depending on how the law is written this may be legal even under US law.

For instance if the law bans US companies from exporting/selling some chips to Chinese companies and that's it then it is unclear to me whether a Chinese company would do anything illegal under US law by buying such chips as it would be for the American seller to refuse.

Anyway, usually this sort of things takes place through intermediaries in third countries so it is difficult to track but obviously it would be stupid to brag about it if that happened.


> PRC companies breaking US export control laws is legal

So long as they don't plan to do any business with the US or any of their allies I guess.


Which allies? The ones the current US president is threatening in all sorts of manner?

I actually hope he doubles down. I would love for EU to rely less on the US. It would also reduce the reach of the silly embargoes that benefit no one but the US.


The USA does not have allies. It has hostages.

Destabilizing world trade and international relations isn't something that anyone not named Trump or Putin should be hoping for.

Depends on how you think this would all play out.

Hard to think they plan to, PRC strategic companies that gets competitive gets entity listed anyway. And CEO seems mission driven for AGI - if US going to limit hardware inevitably then nothing to do but go gloves off, and try to dunk on competition. At this point US can take deep seek off appstores but what's the point except to look petty. Eitherway, more technical ppl have pointed out some of the R1 optimizations _only_ make sense if Deepseek was constrained to older hardware, i.e. engineer at PTX level to circumvent H800 limitations to perfrom more like H100s.

Throwing this model out also gives US allies soverign AI a launchpad... reducing US dependency is step 1 to not being US allies.


> Hard to think they plan to

They already are. You can make a paid account and use their API from most countries around the world. This is what doing business looks like.


This may not be that much of a moat, as Trump seems committed to turning US current allies into former allies.

If they sell software and build devices in China and then people from the US or our allies have to break our laws to import it, it seems like an us problem.



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