DeepSeek

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has ordered federal civilian agencies to stop buying products from DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, and to remove the ones they use, along with other companies' products built with DeepSeek's technology. The department says government information typed into DeepSeek's own apps could end up in China. Agencies can ask for exceptions, and the order does not say how many of them use DeepSeek.

DeepSeek, an AI company in China, has released an update to its V4.1 Flash model that it says scores higher, finishes tasks faster and writes shorter answers than the version it replaces. In DeepSeek's own table, the update beats Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 on 4 of 11 tests, including a coding test called DeepSWE, and trails it on the other 7; Anthropic's newer Opus 5.5 isn't in the table. DeepSeek also opened its in-house search engine to developers.

DeepSeek has released V4.1-Flash, an AI model that reads both images and text, and anyone can download it free of charge. The company first said it would send requests for its V4-Pro model to Flash instead, then changed course and kept V4-Pro running with billing unchanged. DeepSeek describes Flash as ahead of V4-Pro, but its own results still show V4-Pro scoring higher on some exams.