Truly surprised that it took this long for the United States to ban DeepSeek since imposing tariffs would not have worked on the AI models:
“Texas, a constituent state of the United States of America, has announced the ban of the Chinese Open-source AI model app Deepseek, citing national security and data privacy risks. The move is part of a broader effort to curb potential foreign cyber threats and restrict access to Chinese technology within government institutions.
“Texas Governor Greg Abbott, announced the decision, emphasizing the need to protect the state’s digital infrastructure from foreign influence. The ban also includes other Chinese apps such as RedNote, Lemon8, and stock-trading platforms like Moomoo, Tiger Brokers, and Webull.“
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I expect the European Union to do the same thing even as more US states ramp up “bans”.
Sure – it is part of the game. But just as IBM departs Nigeria, the Western World must evaluate how these strategic restrictions are helping their competitiveness in the Global South. Last year, a big bank in Lagos asked my practice to offer an expert external opinion on a technology project. As part of that opinion is modelling the information technology (IT) cost benefit analysis. I write here that Huawei was well ahead of IBM in all core categories and ended up winning the contract.
So, the news that IBM is packing out of Nigeria is not just that Nigeria is losing economic viability, the real deal is that Huawei is uninstalling American vendors in most parts of Africa. Huawei gives you cost competitiveness and since we do not have anything to worry about “national security” (which security?) and “privacy”, we decide to save money.
The ban and the tariffs are accelerating China in the Global South and also making it harder for Western World to benchmark their competitiveness. China has better EVs than Tesla but Americans do not know since BYD cars are banned in the US. Now that the US has expanded banning China to AI models, expect the same redesign to happen. After all, if DeepSeek was banned before its launch, no American would have known that it is as good as those from OpenAI, Google and others.
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