There's still a lot of naivety on what the difference is between models and platforms, and its easier for a lot of these big companies to just make a blanket statement like "nothing DeepSeek" than for their procurement teams to try to understand and negotiate with each vendor. They don't see the potential benefit over the potential risk of somebody misinterpreting or getting it wrong, so they outright ban it.

Most people that approve or buy software simply also just don't understand how models are being trained or if it's possible/how far a model could go to "introduce backdoors." A backdoor could be, from a business perspective, a model which has been trained to give answers that could hurt western business in a "strict text mode" or produces payloads in a programmatic mode that are intentionally trained to introduce software vulnerabilities.

Anyone can make arguments against these for a variety of reasons (looking at the transparency of both sides and comparing, etc) but for many reasons today and for better or worse, many Chinese models are being banned on big software contracts, which gets back to the title of the article