The Great Salami Slicing: How DeepSeek-V4 Broke the Export Ban

While the US focuses on hardware bans, the real war is happening in the "latent space." DeepSeek-V4 dropped today, and it is a masterpiece of efficiency. The "Deep Web" gossip is that the US State Department is absolutely losing its mind because V4's performance suggests it has "distilled" the intelligence of GPT-5 at 1/100th of the cost.

The White House memo, leaked to The Verge’s deep-cover sources, accuses "foreign entities" of using a massive network of bot accounts to "scrape the reasoning paths" of American models. It’s being called "The Great Salami Slicing"—taking tiny slices of logic from a $10 billion model to build a $100 million model that’s just as smart.

The tech community is laughing at the irony. You can ban the chips, but you can’t ban the math. DeepSeek-V4 is essentially a "pirated" version of American AI intelligence, cleaned up and optimized into a lean, mean, inference machine. The panic in Washington isn't about the AI being "evil"; it's about the AI being cheap. If intelligence becomes a commodity that costs pennies, the US's $500 billion "compute moat" becomes a very expensive swimming pool.