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. When they asked an AI model created, or distilled, from that DeepSeek open-source model the same question, it said evidence shows the Chinese state held Uyghurs in “internment-type facilities.”

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. The research also paves the way for US companies to make a stronger case for using cheaper and faster Chinese open-source models, or at least distilling from them to create customized models.

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. The process is known as distillation, where a larger “teacher” model generates data used to train a smaller “student” model. The DeepSeek model either refused to answer politically sensitive questions or “whitewashed” them to be more favorable to China, and the theory was that the model CTGT trained would inherit some censorship through a kind of subliminal learning.

“A lot of companies are looking at things like this, but there’s a large amount of misinformation and just uncertainty about whether these traits that people consider insidious actually transfer over,” said Cyril Gorlla, founder and CEO of CTGT, the San Francisco-based AI lab.

CTGT’s research lands amid an active debate inside the Trump administration over how to handle the risk posed by Chinese open-source models. While Chinese models might refuse to answer a question about Tiananmen Square, the bigger fear voiced by officials, according to Gorlla, is about how large-scale use of Chinese models in the US could eventually shape society to hew to Beijing’s worldview.

An example of the prompts CTGT used for training.

The US-based non-profit research outfit, the China Media Project, called DeepSeek a “much more sophisticated propaganda tool than we all thought,” and said it was aimed at offering “guidance” that serves China’s strategic interests.

DeepSeek didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Officials also fear that Chinese models could contain hidden security backdoors that could be used to essentially exfiltrate information from unsuspecting users. That fear has never been established with any solid evidence.

Gorlla said his team has been in touch with US officials, who expressed interest in the findings.

“The research calls into question whether it makes sense to ban these models,” said Jane Horvath, partner at Gibson Dunn and former chief privacy officer at Apple. “These are raw materials. It’s software.”