The AI Wire ●

DeepSeek and MiniMax have won Chinese state approval for global use of their AI models, according to a post on Thursday, October 22, by Yuyuan Tantian, a social media account affiliated with state broadcaster CCTV, Reuters reported on October 23. A follow-up post on Friday said overseas users had urged other Chinese open-source labs to follow suit.

Neither DeepSeek nor MiniMax replied to Reuters' requests for comment, and no official document has been published — so the Wire is carrying this as a rumor until the labs or a regulator confirm it directly. State-media-affiliated accounts have trailed Chinese AI policy moves before, but they are not the approval itself.

The timing is the story. China proposed export controls on 23 AI technologies on October 16, covering overseas deployment of models, agents and computing clusters, while the commerce ministry said most AI technology would stay exportable, with simplified licensing for open-source exports. An approval for the country's two best-known open-weight labs would be the first clear sign of where that line is being drawn.

DeepSeek is wrapping up a funding round of about 100 billion yuan (roughly $15 billion), four people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Thursday — one of the largest funding rounds in China. Battery maker CATL and WeChat operator Tencent were among the biggest investors, with more than 15 investors in total, including new backers Midea, Meituan, Geely and GigaDevice.

Reuters reported the round values DeepSeek at 500 billion yuan before the new capital, double its original 50 billion yuan fundraising target. Bloomberg first reported the $15 billion figure. The round is expected to complete in the coming days, but one source cautioned that financial details and the investor lineup are not ironclad and could still change; DeepSeek, CATL and Tencent did not comment.

The raise lands two days after the US Department of Homeland Security ordered DeepSeek out of federal civilian agencies, and follows a June round of more than $7 billion at a $50 billion valuation. It is the rare Chinese-lab story that clears the Wire's bar: a raise of this size, aimed at AI infrastructure and open models, directly funds the strongest open-weight challenger to the US labs.

A Chinese-speaking hacker broke into websites belonging to more than 100 companies while leaving nearly all the work to AI agents, according to a Reuters exclusive published on Monday, October 19. Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at NorForge, said he watched the agents attempt more than 1,200 sites across the US, Canada, Australia and Japan starting September 25.

The victims Reuters confirmed include farm equipment maker Deere, home appliance company SharkNinja and engine manufacturer Cummins. Each successful intrusion took the agents about 23 hours, and Fagerland put the full bill at about $5,000 in tokens — roughly $50 per successful hack. The operator's instructions fit in fewer than 100 Chinese characters: find a way to run code on each site, then plant an uploader web shell.

The campaign ran on Cairn, an open-source AI problem-solving platform popular with hackers, under a worker string NorForge reads as Claude Code calling DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash model. Fagerland found it by scanning for inadvertently exposed Cairn panels — about two dozen malicious instances by October 2 — and Reuters independently examined the activity. "It's not script kiddie stuff," Fagerland told Reuters; the campaign was still running late last week, and how much data was taken remains undetermined.

A Department of Homeland Security notice filed for public inspection on October 19 makes public Exclusion and Removal Order #2026-01, signed by Secretary Markwayne Mullin on July 24, 2026. The order bars federal civilian agencies from buying DeepSeek products and requires them to remove existing ones from their systems.

The reach is broader than DeepSeek itself: it also covers affiliate products and any third-party products or services developed using DeepSeek implementations. DHS acted under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018, following a Federal Acquisition Security Council recommendation, with formal Federal Register publication scheduled for October 20.

DHS said DeepSeek's models present 'multiple threat vectors,' warning that use by government employees or vendors may transfer sensitive data to China and could be combined with other records to build actionable intelligence on U.S. persons. The order is limited to civilian executive-branch agencies and excludes national security systems, with a written exception process handled through CISA.

DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 on October 17, about five weeks after the previous Flash checkpoint, describing it as a Pareto improvement in performance and cost. API pricing is unchanged and developers reach it through the existing deepseek-flash endpoint; weights are also available for download.

On DeepSeek's own DeepSWE v1.1 coding evaluation the new model scores 77.0%, up from 74.2% for the previous version and above the 74.0% the company lists for Claude Opus 5. DeepSeek says shorter outputs lower the effective cost further, with per-task costs often under $0.20-$0.25 in its figures — company-reported numbers that have not been independently verified.

Alongside the model, DeepSeek opened its search and web-page retrieval tools to developers at $0.75 per 1,000 calls, free for a limited time when connected as a server-side feature to designated development tools. The release keeps pressure on the majors on cost per coding task, even as the headline gains are incremental.

DeepSeek launched V4.1 Flash, a 552B mixture-of-experts model (only ~8B parameters active while reading, ~16B while writing) with aggressive KV-cache compression that pushes API prices far below Western frontier models. DeepSeek is routing flagship V4 Pro traffic to it. Independent coding benchmarks put it roughly on par with GPT-5.6 Sol — Matthew Berman covered the launch the same week.