Censorship in Chinese AI models can be undone, new research shows

When researchers asked a question about Uyghur detention camps in China, one of DeepSeek’s open-source AI models claimed there was no evidence they existed. AI models created using open-source Chinese versions like DeepSeek’s and Moonshot’s don’t always adhere to the same censorship guidelines that the purely Chinese models follow, the researchers said in a new paper shared exclusively with Semafor. The findings undercut one of the US government’s top concerns — that Chinese open-source AI models are a pathway for Chinese political ideas to infiltrate the views of those who use them. CTGT, which focuses on probing the inner workings of AI models for high-risk use cases, built a new AI model using DeepSeek V4 Flash’s outputs as training data. CTGT’s research lands amid an active debate inside the Trump administration over how to handle the risk posed by Chinese open-source models.