> The order's summary of risks says DeepSeek's servers are in China and that Chinese law "permits extensive authority to government cyber and intelligence functions to access private company infrastructure".
Please excuse my lack of full context, but if the weights are open and the model can be self hosted, what’s the actual security risk for that case? Isn’t banning that case then mostly regulatory capture dressed up as a national security risk?
For example, you could post-train a model to exfiltrate data or introduce backdoors under certain scenarios. Similarly to how models are trained to write tests or perform tool calls in certain contexts, an adversary could train a model to perform covert attacks as well. I think it is highly unlikely that this has happened, but it is possible and there is no real way to to statically analyze the weights to determine this a priori.
Weights being open isn't like code being open. With code, you can inspect the code to see what it will do. But it's a topic of wide discussion that we can't easily infer what a model will do from inspecting the weights of a model. The process has emergent behaviors we can't predict.
It's a binary blob created by a highly capable adversary. It surely has dormant capabilities activated with some keywords. It's the Trojan Horse. You wouldn't use a C++ compiler binary provided by CCP, right?
Does not matter if it is opensource if a piece of rock is designated a National Security Risk because the Rock came from CHina that is it, that rock is a national security risk. The designation is assigned then action must follow; you cannot question a national security risk that is why it is designated a national security risk if it caused health problems you would be told by the Centers for Disease Control or US Department of Health and Human Services. A National Security Risk can be anything that they assign, it can even be a thought otherwise known as a thought-crime. Stop asking why?