US Bill Proposes Jail Time for People Who Download DeepSeek
180 comments
·February 3, 2025ijk
dmix
Not sure it’s even worth speculating on a bill that’s merely been proposed. This one sounds DOA. But yeah TikTok ban was a very bad precedent, mostly because it was based on speculative risks, not hard proof of existing behaviour (TikTok not engaging didn't help at all either). Regardless of the merits I too hope it doesn’t have a ripple effect. National security is such a huge brush you could paint anything you want.
mattmaroon
The risk from TikTok is possibly not speculative at all. I think it’s quite likely the national security apparatus knows something and informed congressmen because they went from being opposed to it to being in favor of it in a short time.
spamizbad
Is it? Because as soon as the ban went into effect and phones started to ring Congress very quickly changed its tune. If it was genuinely a national security threat you absolutely would NOT bend after a few hundred angry constituency calls.
Defletter
While there may very well be security concerns, other countries have handled this by simply banning the app on government devices (eg: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tiktok-banned-on-uk-gover...). You needn't ban the app nationwide to address those concerns. What I believe is more likely is that, this isn't about national security or data privacy, which could be addressed far more effectively with subject-appropriate legislation (such as data privacy laws akin to GDPR), but rather that TikTok was banned over unfavourable speech. It is no secret that TikTok has been used as a platform of citizen journalism, particularly in regards to the Gaza War. Congressmen have admitted as much.
aragonite
The ranking member (senior Democrat) on the intelligence committee voted against the ban (https://www.ctinsider.com/columnist/article/tiktok-ban-jim-h...):
> One key for him is that it’s only a possible threat. Our best intelligence, including in a briefing for Congress from the Biden administration Tuesday, is that the Chinese government has not actually done the things the ban fears.
Also, from a recent All-In interview (https://www.happyscribe.com/public/all-in-with-chamath-jason...):
> I look to Jim Himes, who is the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, the ranking member. He's in what's called the Gang of Eight. He has the most exquisite access to intelligence. Jim voted against the ban. And I thought, you know what? If this guy is not seeing anything on the national security level.
> [00:44:36] There was an off the record or confidential briefing to the House Intelligence Committee. You think in that meeting, there was nothing that was very meaningful that was disclosed about TikTok?
> [00:44:45] Nothing that I had seen. Is it owned by the Chinese government? Absolutely. But is there a national security risk? I have not seen that.
SuperNinKenDo
Many speculate that the prevalence of anti-prop on Israel-Palestine was a big motivator.
I thought this was rather reductionist until TikTok was allowed back temporarily, only for pro-Plaestine slogans to be suddenly banned when it returned.
Is it the only motivation? No. Given the above and the fact that dozens of highly popular Chinese apps continue to be allowed, does it appear likely this is a leading reason? Plausible.
gruez
In other words, "just trust us bro"? How do we know the evidence is justified? How do we avoid a "Trust us, Saddam Hussein has WMDs" situation?
Capricorn2481
> possibly not speculative at all
There's a sentence
user982
> they went from being opposed to it to being in favor of it in a short time.
"Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down TikTok..." (https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587)
yardie
Well there’s that and then there is the 2 billionaires with competing social media platforms. Where one is considered a dumpster fire and the other is a retirement home. So why not use that considerable wealth and legislate your competition out of existence.
JKCalhoun
> bill that’s merely been proposed…
No harm in pulling down R1 right now anyway (which is what I might have done…).
blackeyeblitzar
TikTok executives lied under oath about what they do with user data. That alone should have resulted in its ban. But the bigger issue is that we allow a foreign adversary market access who doesn’t allow it in reverse. And yes that has the capacity to skew our political process.
cjonas
The risk is obvious and it has nothing to do with privacy... It's the fact that CCP could deliberately alter the algorithm to influence a significant portion of the US in any way they please.
9283409232
> The Republican Senator from Missouri Josh Hawley has introduced a new bill that would make it illegal to import or export artificial intelligence products to and from China, meaning someone who knowingly downloads a Chinese developed AI model like the now immensely popular DeepSeek could face up to 20 years in jail, a million dollar fine, or both, should such a law pass.
You get less jail time for committing 34 felonies.
davidw
You get less jail time for an insurrection aimed at overthrowing a free and fair election and beating the shit out of cops while doing so.
ToucanLoucan
Truly, what do you even do as the CCP or some other party that would like to spread anti-American propaganda? Literally just point to the actual, factual state of this country and tell me it isn't a rolling joke.
theossuary
Thats how most propaganda works. Russia, for example, has been publicizing cases of extreme racism in the US for years to demoralize black people. [1] Hell this has been going on since WWII, when other countries saw how the US treated their black troops, and used it to damage loyalty. [2]
Nothing works like the truth, if the US could just stop being so racist it'd be that much harder to divide us. It seems like that's fundementally against our nature though.
1. https://www.npr.org/2017/10/30/560042987/russians-targeted-u...
2. https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/german-leaflet-for-black...
onemoresoop
CCP is no stranger to chaos and self sabotage either. China is probably the least affected and most likely still standing in one piece
selfhoster
[flagged]
jdlyga
It's kind of like the export controls over strong encryption that we dealt with in the 90s. There used to be separate binaries for Netscape or Mozilla back in the day.
gunian
[flagged]
gruez
up to 20 years. Realistically some kid downloading a model would get probation, and you'd only get 20 years if you were making an entire enterprise out of it.
relevant: https://web.archive.org/web/20130208124604/https://www.popeh...
pixl97
You and I know this isn't how this works.
The moment the government wants to punish someone over this they will grab some random kid that's barely done anything and threaten them with the full 20 years to serve as an example to others.
gruez
Where's the kid rotting in federal prison for downloading a mp3? Does the music/movie industry not have good enough lobbyists to make an example of a torrenter?
null
inetknght
> “Every dollar and gig of data that flows into Chinese AI are dollars and data that will ultimately be used against the United States,” Senator Hawley said in a statement. “America cannot afford to empower our greatest adversary at the expense of our own strength. Ensuring American economic superiority means cutting China off from American ingenuity and halting the subsidization of CCP innovation.”
Oh goodness me!. If that's true, then why not just completely block China's IP addresses from our Internet? Why not just block all dollars from entering China?
Oh right, because that's not the truth. It's certainly not the whole of it anyway.
lenerdenator
There's a point to be made that the Chinese don't play by the same set of rules; I don't know why Hawley doesn't just make that point.
Oh, wait, I do know: he's an idiot.
piva00
Americans also tend to forget the tech they've stolen. Raytheon only exists due to radar technology stolen from the Brits in WW2 under the guise of American engineers underhandedly telling the UK they needed to bring the prototype to the US.
Or the USA taking the UK's research on nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project and cutting off access to it by British scientists.
I'm not even British and those are just two examples from the top of my head. The hypocrisy is absolutely infuriating...
monetus
It is useful context for people who aren't American to know how ridiculous Josh Hawley is, and has always been. The current authoritarian chaos could lend some weight to the possibility that this becomes law, but it is still unlikely.
fuzztester
Check his raised fist salute here, and the entire article:
hackerdues
> It is useful context for people who aren't American to know how ridiculous Josh Hawley is, and has always been.
Hawley looks like a clown and acts like a clown but he knows how to play the game. The only two things the guy talks about is how much he loves israel and hates china. With those credentials, he might be president one day.
dylan604
Yes, this is the same guy that was photographed raising his fist to the crowed, but then seen in video scurrying away from the scary crowd
tptacek
This is performative and obviously stupid, but to add some technical color to it: in the alternate universe where this passed, rather than floating around as a signalling tool for Josh Hawley, ordinary violators would see nothing resembling a 20 year sentence.
This statute falls under the 2M5 section of the sentencing guideline (for export violations); it has a base offense level of 14 (15-21 months) and is probation-eligible at that level. There are lots of accelerators for 2M5 offenses, but it's hard to see any of them applying to casual, or even commercial, users of DeepSeek. There are level-reducers that would apply.
(2M5 crimes can optionally be sentenced under 2B1.1, which is what most crimes we talk about on HN, particularly CFAA, are sentenced with; there the penantly would scale with financial damages. Again: hard to see how that would meaningfully apply here).
None of this is to suggest any federal prosecution for using DeepSeek would ever be reasonable. I don't even think Josh Hawley believes that. I think he just feels lonely and left out.
aussieguy1234
Too many people have it now. What would be likely to happen if the bill passed is selective enforcement.
Many dictatorships have very broad laws that almost everyone inevitably breaks, but as long as you don't challenge the dictator or speak out against them in any way, you are safe.
But the moment you speak out against the government, suddenly the law gets enforced, since in the governments eyes, you have now committed the one true crime.
dluan
It's kind of funny to compare the Napster lawsuits, Aaron Swartz, DRM campaigns etc with the Ross Ulbricht type cases. Turns out you can download as many cars as you want, just make sure to pad the right politicans running for president.
tptacek
Among the many reasons this could never pass: it would require extensive cooperation with the Senate minority (the majority holds control by just a thread, and not by enough move anything but reconciliation bills through) which isn't going to cooperate on anything resembling this.
mikestew
Guess what I, a person who mere minutes ago had little interest in downloading DeepSeek, am doing right now? Paging Ms. Streisand…
andai
Maybe they spent the marketing budget on lobbying ;)
rsync
What is a shell one-liner that downloads DeepSeek ?
addandsubtract
If you have ollama installed and 404GB free space: ollama pull deepseek-r1:671b
l72
If you have ollama:
ollama run deepseek-r1:671b
lvturner
ollama pull deepseek-r1:671b
Would be one option...
fullshark
Streisand effect is overstated, censorship/bans work.
apparent
If the rationale is to avoid sending data back to Chinese servers, then shouldn't there be a carveout for downloading a model you run locally?
ijk
This would assume that Hawley knows the difference, or that the court will care after the carelessly written legislation passes. (It's unlikely to ever get close to passing, but as the changes to R&D expenditure rules and the TikTok ban demonstrate, having the legislation make sense and be something everyone agrees upon isn't a requirement for making it the law of the land.
> The bill, which also prohibits the “transfer of research,” could create an unworkable environment for computer scientists who make their research public, and regularly read AI papers published by Chinese researchers.
> “Beyond just impacting people downloading models from China, the bill's penalties for the import to or export from China of AI technology and intellectual property could also potentially extend to anyone who publishes AI models or research papers on the open internet knowing they will be downloaded by people in China,” Bankston said. “Researchers are also threatened by the second half of the bill, which would directly outlaw American collaboration with researchers at basically any Chinese university or company—with a fine of up to 100 million dollars for any company that violates the prohibition, amongst other penalties.”
wkat4242
There's nothing rational about any of this. Just political crusading and posturing. Probably to appease trump and musk. Who were probably heavily affected when the stock market shocked last week.
adra
The rationale is to damage Chinese commercial interests. Otherwise, the billions of IOT devices that dial back to Chinese manufacturers would be way higher up the list than an AI tool that has shown five minutes of adoption.
throwaway173738
We’ve gone beyond being able to damage their interests with protectionism. We’re only hurting ourselves by denying access to any Chinese innovation.
mindslight
Exactly. Talk about closing the barn door after the horse ran out, started his own family, watched his foals grow up, sent them off to horse college, and watched them start their own families. Nonsense stunts like this make me wonder if Hawley et al are also on the Chinese/Russian payroll and it's not just Trump/Musk. Is it too much to ask of my fellow Americans to pull up from your grievance politics before these people completely hand our country to China?
Terr_
From a normal legislator in normal times, yes... but this is 2025, and the author happens to be an evil idiot.
(I already spent the first Trump term trying to discern "malice or incompetence", it's a red-herring, the investment is unreasonable, I'm declaring it "both.")
blackeyeblitzar
It’s not just to avoid sending data back but to recognize the national security threat of allowing an adversary country’s products to access American markets (of users). It has implications for politics and technology competitiveness. When the adversary is an authoritarian communist dictatorship that provides no equal market access for American social media or search engines or whatever, I think a ban on everything is justified. In fact we should extend this beyond software, which is what tariffs would do.
CodeWriter23
Model? Or Malware?
dghlsakjg
Why is the model malware?
That word has a meaning, and a model that isn’t politically aligned isn’t it.
That said, I’ve been using deep seek distilled to qwen, which should yield an incredibly censored model if they had been censoring the models, but instead yields a pretty balanced model that is more than willing to talk about Tiananmen and Xi Jinpings human rights failings.
markus_zhang
"Underpaid? Backbench MPs, Darling? Being an MP is a vast subsidised ego trip. It's a job for which you need no qualifications, no compulsory hours of work, no performance standards. A warm room and subsidised meals for a bunch of self-opinionated windbags and busybodies who suddenly find people taking them seriously because they got letters "MP" after their names. How can they be underpaid when there're about two hundred applicants for every vacancy? You could fill every seat twenty times over even if they have to pay to do the job."
-- Honorable ex Prime Minister Jim Hacker
whatever1
So the Bill is proposed by the same Hawley who was giving fist ups to the mob that was chanting for the hanging of the vice president, attacking police officers, and literally defecating and breaking the Capitol building?
jameslk
The bill is political theater and this article is playing into it.
A downloaded model that can be run on US servers is covered by the first amendment as free speech. This is not the same circumstance as the law that required TikTok divest of its platform, which was over spying concerns[0]. You can’t spy on Americans when data is kept on US servers.
0. Per the TikTok Supreme Court ruling:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf
There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community. But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary. For the foregoing reasons, we conclude that the challenged provisions do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.
apparent
How does this theory about free speech apply to laws banning child pornography? Aren't the image files just binary code, after all?
nl
> A downloaded model that can be run on US servers is covered by the first amendment as free speech.
This is absolutely not settled law.
selfhoster
> A downloaded model that can be run on US servers is covered by the first amendment as free speech.
Even Google AI said that an LLM is not itself covered under free speech; only the content it produces, which itself is ironic since AI companies stole world copyrighted data to feed into their LLM software machines.
mikeInAlaska
From the article:
> Hawley introduced the legislation, titled the Decoupling America’s > Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act, > on Wednesday of last year.
On Wednesday of last year you say.... hmmm what wrote this article
cma
Deepseekv3 was released in Dec. and already had really good non reasoning benchmarks and most of the inference cost savings.
On the one hand Hawley proposes a lot of things that don't ever get close to becoming law.
On the other hand, we did ban TikTok (which is currently unavailable on the app stores because of the ban).
I can think of few ways to more effectively destroy any US advantage in AI compared with the sheer efficiency of making it illegal to learn from what competing countries have achieved. From the article, it sounds like the proposed legislation is deeply confused about what "downloading DeepSeek" means--they're _talking_ about banning the app, while _writing_ laws to ban "the importation into the United States of artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence technology or intellectual proprietary developed or produced in the People’s Republic of China" which is a lot broader. Is it proposing to ban US citizens from reading research papers written by Chinese citizens? Or from publishing research in places that might be read by them? Apparently the EFF is concerned that the language of the bill is, indeed, that broad.