Basically yes. China doesn't have a democracy, and it's government isn't bound by it's laws. If CCP thinks deepseek or any other product/tech can be a beneficial to Chinese strategy they will come knocking, and there's no denying whatever they demand. It can be backdooring, data harvesting, etc, there's really no saying how far they might go.
On the other hand at least you can self host their models. My university now has an inference cluster for students and faculty to use open source models.
Well, not using the site probably means that you're avoiding the mini-LLMs powdered before and after the main LLM to provide filters (including some layers of censorship) and the system prompt.
So I guess it depends on how deep the bias sits. And that is something that may vary with time. Grok has been a good example of this, with the bias initially being introduced as system prompts, then apparently moved to synthetic data used to train the further generations of Grok.
