"You can't really gatekeep," Mousavizadeh said, noting that there is lots of sharing that occurs in the open source environment, "regardless of governmental policy."
If DeepSeek's success leads to export controls on advanced chips intended to slow Chinese AI efforts that become even stricter, it should also be clear they are no silver bullet. "They're not a way to duck the competition between the US and China," wrote Dario Amodei, CEO of gen AI startup Anthropic, in a blog post last week. "In the end, AI companies in the US and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail. But we shouldn't hand the Chinese Communist Party technological advantages when we don't have to."