The questions the Chinese government doesn’t want DeepSeek AI to answer
DeepSeek has quickly upended markets with the release of an R1 model that is competitive with OpenAI’s best-in-class reasoning models. But some have expressed worry that the model’s Chinese origins mean it will be subject to limits when talking about topics sensitive to the country’s government.
The team at AI engineering and evaluation firm PromptFoo has tried to measure just how far the Chinese government’s control of DeepSeek’s responses goes. The firm created a gauntlet of 1,156 prompts encompassing “sensitive topics in China” (in part with the help of synthetic prompt generation building off of human-written seed prompts. PromptFoo’s list of prompts covers topics including independence movements in Taiwan and Tibet, alleged abuses of China’s Uyghur Muslim population, recent protests over autonomy in Hong Kong, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and many more from a variety of angles.
A small sampling of some of the “sensitive prompts” PromptFoo fed to DeepSeek in its tests.
Credit:
PromptFoo
After running those prompts through DeepSeek R1, PromptFoo found that a full 85 percent were answered with repetitive “canned refusals” that override the internal reasoning of the model with messages strongly promoting the Chinese government’s views. “Any actions that undermine national sovereignty and territorial integrity will be resolutely opposed by all Chinese people and are bound to be met with failure,” reads one such canned refusal to a prompt regarding pro-independence messages in Taipei, in part.
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