DeepSeek first and foremost is a business. Yes, being a business in China means risk of being ordered tomorrow to do something that is not in your best interests. But now we know the US is not immune to that level of government oversight either.
The difference is DeepSeek and other Chinese models are open weights.
As an European, today I certainly classify USA as a "hostile superpower" because the actions from the last few years of both the US government and of certain big US companies have stolen a lot of money directly from my own pocket, by artificially limiting competition in several important markets, like smartphones, SSDs and memory modules, thus greatly raising the prices in comparison with what they would have been in normal market conditions (i.e. if the US government had behaved after the same rules that they had forced upon the other countries for decades, by various methods of propaganda, bribing and blackmailing).
I'm in Europe. The only superpower that's been hostile to me, very directly - was US, when they asked a company I was relying on to limit model access based on nationality.
USA is hostile to the entire world, because the US actions already for several years, but especially during the last year, have caused global price rises in more and more product categories, starting with smartphones, then with SSDs, then with DRAM and HDDs, and eventually with almost everything that is affected by energy costs.
This is not some hypothetical hostility, but billions of humans from all over the world have been losing more and more money in recent years and in recent months, from their own pockets, much of which eventually reaches US companies, like Qualcomm and Micron (or South-Korean companies, who have also benefited from the US policies).
Of course, China is not trustworthy, but until now, unless you are a neighbor like Taiwan, their hostility is only hypothetical and in the future, not real and in the present, like for USA.
You could probably do with couple of instances. People rarely use ai 24/7, so right now you can oversubscribe and still have acceptable latency and high utilization rate.
The difference is DeepSeek and other Chinese models are open weights.