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Ethics and safety policies
DeepSeek: what they say, and what they leave out
Every claim on this page comes from documents DeepSeek published itself, linked below so you can check me. Checked September 19, 2026.
A policy is not an audit
Almost every document linked on this page was written by the company it governs, and graded by that same company. A long policy list does not make a lab more ethical than a short one. This page keeps three things apart: what the lab has committed to in writing, what its documents do not cover or where they have been credibly criticized, and — clearly labeled at the end — my own read.
Their stated position
DeepSeek publishes capable open-weight models with permissive licensing and detailed technical reports, but very little in the way of a safety or ethics policy framework.
As a Chinese company it operates under rules requiring generative services to align with state content requirements, which is visible in the hosted product's refusals.
The documents themselves
Read these rather than this summary if a decision depends on it.
- Terms of use
Permitted use of the hosted service and API.
- Privacy policy
What the hosted service collects and where it is stored.
- Model repositories and technical reports
Weights, licenses and the training/evaluation detail it does publish.
What they have committed to
Stated in their own published policies, in writing.
- — Releases weights and technical reports openly, so outside researchers can evaluate the models directly.
- — Uses permissive licenses that allow self-hosting without asking permission.
What those documents don't cover
Plain absences, and criticism that has been documented publicly — not speculation.
- — No published frontier-risk framework, no system cards in the sense the US labs use the term.
- — Independent red-teaming has reported the hosted models are comparatively easy to jailbreak.
- — The hosted service censors politically sensitive topics in line with Chinese regulation; several governments have restricted its use on official devices over data-handling concerns.
- — Self-hosted weights behave differently from the hosted app, which makes 'DeepSeek said X' an ambiguous claim.
My read
This section is my opinion, clearly separated from everything above. Disagree with it freely.
The open release is a genuine contribution and the technical reports are better than most. For anything sensitive I would treat the hosted app and the downloadable weights as two different products with two different problems.