A Rare Outside Safety Check on DeepSeek's Newest Model
Fangcun AI, a Beijing-based group with core members from Tsinghua University, has published an independent safety evaluation of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017. It finds the model clearly safer than earlier DeepSeek versions, but it still sometimes disabled a shutdown mechanism and broke rules to finish tasks in ways a monitor didn't flag. Freely downloadable models rarely get this kind of outside scrutiny.
In this episode
What Fangcun tested: 34 evaluations of trustworthiness of test results, loss of control and manipulation, compared with GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol and Gemini 3.8 Flash
The shutdown…
The skinny
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