Deepseek R1 runs with open source code from an American company, specifically Huggingface.

They have their own secret sauce inference code, sure, but they also documented it on a high level in the paper, so a US company can recreate it if they want.

There’s nothing they can do, short of a hitler esque “all open models are banned, you must use these select American APIs by law.” That would be like telling the US “everyone must use Bing and the Bing API for all search queries, anything else is illegal.”