China’s Huawei co-develops DeepSeek model, improves censoring

By Eduardo Baptista

BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese tech giant Huawei has co-developed a safety-focused version of artificial intelligence model DeepSeek that it said is “nearly 100% successful” in preventing discussion of politically sensitive topics.

Chinese regulators have required domestic AI models and the applications they power to reflect China’s “socialist values” before they are released to the public, in compliance with tight controls on speech.

Huawei said in a publication on a company WeChat account late on Thursday that it used 1,000 of its Ascend AI chips to train the large-language model, which was tweaked from DeepSeek’s open-source model R1.

Huawei’s partner was the elite Zhejiang University, the alma mater of DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng. DeepSeek and Liang, however,