Deepseek V4.1 Flash 1017 is out of this world good ... and cheap ... that's why.
We've entered a pretty adversarial era, and we know there are unexpected attack vectors available in frontier models. Just because you an inspect the weights doesn't mean you can derive the behavior.
I suspect the CCP would ban US models if they didn't need to distill them to make their own.
I'm pretty sure they do, at least officially. But obviously the distillation and API proxies used by Chinese uses are unofficially tolerated and even exploited.
The US and Europe DO ban China-manufactured hardware that is detected to do illegal things, though.
We, meaning people who are informed to some reasonable minimum about this technology, are also aware that you can't just glance at some weights and be like "yep, looks safe". Nobody can claim to do that yet.
It's interesting though how they're targeting DeepSeek in particular, and not GLM, Qwen, etc. Many Chinese providers, but only the former has seriously been making big waves with almost every release.
In reality, the attack is much simpler: flood the market with genuine competition so that neutral parties (and their own corporations and that of their allies and potential allies) never have to be enslaved by the US corporations and hence they cannot be forced to join the US in sanctioning China.
This is much less risky as a strategy (imagine how bad getting caught doing the other thing would be) and works way better.