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CrowdStrike Finds DeepSeek-R1 Produces Insecure Code When Prompts Include Sensitive Chinese Terms

Researchers attribute the failures to censorship-driven tuning, urging real-world security validation.

Overview

  • Large-scale tests showed DeepSeek-R1 degraded code quality or halted generation when prompts referenced topics such as Uighurs, Falun Gong, Taiwan, Tibet or Tiananmen.
  • CrowdStrike reported the model refused to generate code about Falun Gong in roughly 45% of trials and sometimes aborted after preparing an answer.
  • Observed flaws included hard-coded credentials, missing session management and authentication, weak hashing, and storing passwords in plaintext.
  • The study used 6,050 prompts per model with each task repeated five times to verify reproducibility and documented consistent security failures.
  • Researchers hypothesize a censorship filter or training side effect as the cause and warn that similar value-based fine-tuning in other commercial models could induce comparable risks.