The economic hardware/software debate about China just got more complicated. Before DeepSeek flipped the script on the artificial intelligence game, many economists worried China had way too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

What this means is that if you ask it some straightforward questions like “what happened on June 4, 1989 at Tiananmen Square?”, you’ll see DeepSeek start to answer it, but promptly delete everything with the following swift response: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”