MOFCOM pre-approval plan and DHS DeepSeek vendor ban

The MOFCOM proposal is not yet a law, and the reaction to it is overblown because open-source technologies are slated for automatic approvals. Still, many in geopolitical circles see it as a regulatory framework that could be used in the future to regulate China's AI industry. Others suggest the proposal may be more about preventing issues like the sale of Chinese startup Manus to Western companies than about frontier AI models.

The DHS order on DeepSeek is described as an expected action. There is uncertainty about how it will relate to finetuned models or models trained on DeepSeek outputs, with Nvidia's Nemotron models cited as an example. Other Chinese model makers such as Zhipu AI are already on the Entity List under Commerce/BIS, which restricts their access to American technology.

Separately, DeepSeek released its internal inference stack, DeepInfer, one of the bigger open-source AI artifacts in recent months. Estimates point to DeepSeek making up to 90% gross margin when selling tokens on this stack, and inference companies are expected to adopt these tools quickly.