DeepSeek and MiniMax win Chinese approval for global deployment

Bloomberg, citing Chinese state media, reported on October 23 that DeepSeek and MiniMax won regulatory approval for global use of their models. The approval formalizes Beijing's backing for two of its most internationally visible AI labs as they push overseas.

The approval matters mechanically because Chinese generative AI services must register with and be cleared by regulators. Global deployment clearance lets these firms offer services and APIs to foreign customers with explicit state sanction. That could ease enterprise procurement concerns in markets friendly to China while complicating them elsewhere.

The timing is notable. DeepSeek just closed a 100B-yuan round, opened cheap Search and Fetch APIs, and shipped V4.1-Flash-1017. Chinese open-weight models are also winning on cost: Berlin search engine Ecosia reported cutting AI costs about 50% by switching from Mistral to Qwen, GLM and other open-weight models. The approval adds a distribution push to an already aggressive pricing strategy. The US, by contrast, has imposed federal restrictions on DeepSeek, which Perplexity-sourced community chatter says has damped Western developer enthusiasm.

The caveats are thin details: state media did not specify which products or regions the approval covers, or under what data-handling terms. Western enterprises will weigh this against concerns such as a security study this week that found Qwen3-Coder produced more exploitable code for US targets. Watch whether European clouds list DeepSeek or MiniMax endpoints next.