DeepSeek fades after bans, security woes

DeepSeek's explosive hype cycle has given way to a quiet institutional death — but the open-weight models live on for those willing to self-host.

• –A publicly exposed database leak revealed chat history, backend data, and plaintext credentials with no authentication required — a critical trust failure
• –Italy forced removal from Apple and Google app stores in January 2025; Germany's DPA characterized DeepSeek as "illegal content" and sent notice-and-action orders to both stores by mid-2025
• –Australia, South Korea, and Taiwan banned DeepSeek on government systems; Australia formalized a full directive in February 2026
• –Anthropic accused DeepSeek of using fraudulent accounts to scrape Claude conversations for training data, adding distillation ethics concerns to the pile
• –Self-hosted inference of DeepSeek open-weight models sidesteps the cloud data concerns entirely — for developers comfortable running local inference, the models remain capable and competitive