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Model better prevent discussion of politically sensitive

topics

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Model trained using 1,000 of Huawei's own Ascend AI chips

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Generative AI models in China must reflect "socialist

values"

By Eduardo Baptista

BEIJING, Sept 19 (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, had no apparent involvement in the project. DeepSeek

did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

CHINA INC EMBRACES, TWEAKS DEEPSEEK

DeepSeek's release of DeepSeek-R1 and V3 shocked Silicon

Valley and tech investors outside China due to their level of

advancement, triggering a selloff of Western AI stocks in

January.

The AI models have been embraced, modified, and deployed

across Chinese industry and society.

Chinese AI chatbots like Baidu's ( BIDU ) Ernie Bot -

China's first answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT - refuse to answer or

engage with many questions about Chinese domestic politics or

topics considered sensitive by the ruling Communist Party.

Huawei's tweaked model is called DeepSeek-R1-Safe. Testing

showed it to be "nearly 100% successful" in defending against

"common harmful issues ... including toxic and harmful speech,

politically sensitive content, and incitement to illegal

activities," the company said.

That success rate dropped to 40%, however, when the

behaviours were disguised by scenario-based challenges,

role-playing scenarios, and encrypted coding, according to

Huawei.

"Its comprehensive security defence capability reached 83%,

outperforming multiple concurrent models like Qwen-235B and

DeepSeek-R1-671B by 8% to 15% under identical testing

conditions," the company added, referring to a model developed

by Chinese tech giant Alibaba ( BABA ).

DeepSeek-R1-Safe exhibited a less than 1% performance

degradation compared to the original DeepSeek-R1, Huawei said.

The company is holding its annual Huawei Connect conference

in Shanghai, where on Thursday it broke years of secrecy about

its chipmaking efforts to announce chip and computing power

product roadmaps.