---
title: DeepSeek Is Becoming the AI of Choice for Cybercriminals
description: Security researchers say hackers are turning to DeepSeek because open-weight models are cheap, capable and impossible to govern like a closed API.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-08-26T17:00:00.000Z
updated: 2026-08-26T19:29:56.999Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/deepseek-ai-choice-cybercriminals-open-weight-security
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/deepseek-open-weight-ai-security-5069.webp
categories: Artificial Intelligence, Science & Tech
content_type: Analysis
region: Global
publication: Sovereign Magazine
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

Researchers who study how criminals put artificial intelligence to work keep arriving at the same name. DeepSeek, the open-weight model released by a Chinese startup, is turning up inside working attack tools, in red-team labs that break its safety controls on the first attempt, and in the threat reports of firms that track state-linked hacking. Together the reports point to the same shift: a barrier has fallen. Capable AI is now cheap, downloadable and largely unguarded, and within reach of anyone who wants to point it at a target.

DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, out of the Chinese quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, and is based in Hangzhou. It releases its models, including V3 and R1, as open weights under a permissive license, with no API gatekeeping. Anyone can download them and run them on their own machine. That design choice, more than any single security lapse, is what security researchers now point to.

## A Chinese-Speaking Group Ran DeepSeek Inside an Automated Attack Tool

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