New bill will make it a crime to download DeepSeek in the U.S.

Would make for an interesting First Amendment case.

I haven’t read this particular proposed bill, but it seems obvious that something like PAFACA (the TikTok ban) should exist to cover AI and maybe other things from adversary countries, not just social media. If users have their privacy violated or worse, all their data exposed to the Internet as with DeepSeek (https://www.wiz.io/blog/wiz-research-uncovers-exposed-deepse...), the terms don’t help them since it would require going to a Chinese court. It is also hard to trust the data protections of Chinese products after services like TikTok have lied about what they do with the data.

It’s also a danger for America or others to share competitive AI tech with China, which will reduce technology or economy advantages and also since AI will end up in military applications. But maybe it’s too late to stop that. They already have many GPUs and the weights from several models.

The propaganda in DeepSeek (https://www.promptfoo.dev/blog/deepseek-censorship/) also shows the danger these products can pose, and I bet the CCP will force these companies to inject their viewpoints on many topics where it’s harder to detect. But this gets more complicated because we have to consider if this is a free speech issue.