Keep your friends close, Keep your enemies closer.

January 20, 2025 was a day that challenged America. DeepSeek R1 was released into the wild. Now, just over two weeks later, it’s being banned.

But that brings us to a technological and moral dilemma. On the one hand, Chinese technology companies have demonstrated a willingness to engage in state sponsored surveillance and espionage. The proliferated use of Chinese AI will pose an obvious national security risk.

At the same time, it is difficult to comprehend how sophisticated our adversaries have become unless we can use and understand their technology. We need to keep our enemies close to keep pace with them.

There are techniques we can use to safely interact with DeepSeek R1 and other productive yet suspect Chinese Technologies. And we should interact, just as we tuned into Sputnik’s radio transmissions almost 70 years ago. These techniques include Air-gaping, Sandboxing, and following certain publicly available NSA Protocols.

The government shouldn’t ban technology, the US should educate the public on how to handle technologies properly. We want to limit any entity’s ability to collect data in real time, aggregate metadata, and contextually synthesize controlled or classified information.