Daily AI news, sourcedOfficial news, first rumor reports and substantive progress. Each entry keeps the information published at that time.
- DeepSeek Harness shows Creator Mode demos and bilingual prompt packs
DeepSeek Harness published Creator Mode demos and seven Chinese/English prompt sets that show building plugins in natural language. Harness is still in developer preview; some plugins were refined over multiple turns, so a single prompt may not reproduce the demo.
- Fangcun Leap publishes an 87-page third-party safety eval of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017
Fangcun Leap (incubated by Tsinghua’s Institute for AI and IIIS) released an 87-page third-party safety evaluation of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017 covering loss-of-control and harmful-manipulation risks across 34 tests and six comparison models. The report states it received no funding, compute, or non-public access from DeepSeek.
- DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is live on Alibaba Cloud's Token Plan
Alibaba Cloud says DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is now on its Token Plan, citing 77.0 pass@1 on DeepSWE v1.1, a 1M-token context and 384K output, at the same price as deepseek-v4.1-flash with off-peak discounts.
- DHS orders civilian federal agencies to remove DeepSeek products and bars them from buying DeepSeek technology
The Department of Homeland Security published notice of an order excluding IT products and services from Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and its affiliates from federal civilian agency procurements. The order also removes all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, plus third-party products and services built using DeepSeek implementations, from civilian agency IT systems. It was issued under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act after a Federal Acquisition Security Council review, and the notice was filed on Oct. 19 for publication in the Federal Register on Oct. 20. CyberScoop reports that the signed order from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is dated June 26 and cites risks including data transfers to China.
OfficialOfficial updateSource: U.S. Department of Homeland Security (Federal Register)Part of DeepSeek - DeepSeek upgrades V4.1 Flash to the 1017 snapshot and open-sources its weights
DeepSeek's API change log says V4.1 Flash has been upgraded to DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, and the official web and app now use the new version too. API calls and pricing are unchanged: the deepseek-flash model name now points to the 1017 snapshot. DeepSeek reports gains over the September V4.1 Flash release, including Terminal-Bench 4.0 at 42.3 (up from 31.2), DeepSWE v1.1 at 77.0 (from 74.2) and HLE without tools at 42.6 (from 36.8), while cutting task runtime and output length; these scores are self-reported by DeepSeek. It says the model is tuned for DeepSeek Harness, Tencent CodeBuddy and WorkBuddy, and recommends DeepSeek Harness 0.2.1-rc.1 or later. DeepSeek says self-feedback reinforcement learning improved the model's ability to build complete projects from scratch, such as games and 3D scenes, and it has released the 1017 weights under the MIT license on Hugging Face and ModelScope.
- DeepSeek opens its in-house search engine to developers with new Search and Fetch APIs
DeepSeek's API change log says it is opening up the in-house search engine that already powers search in its web app and API. DeepSeek describes DeepSeek Search as an AI-native, multilingual engine indexing hundreds of billions of web pages and handling hundreds of millions of searches a day, and says it filters SEO spam, GEO manipulation and low-quality AI-generated content. The Search API (POST /v1/tools/search) returns up to 50 structured results per query with optional page content and supports operators such as site:, lang:, after: and before:. A companion Fetch API (POST /v1/tools/fetch) returns a single web page as Markdown. Both use the standard DeepSeek API key and are aimed at agents and RAG applications. DeepSeek lists both at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, and says Search and Fetch calls made server-side when using its API in DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex are free for now but will be billed per call from 00:00 Beijing time on November 1, 2026.
- DeepSeek reports a partial outage of chat and V4 Pro and V4.1 Flash APIs while a DeepSeekHarness Bilibili account appears
DeepSeek's status page reported a partial outage of its chat service and DeepSeek V4 Pro and V4.1 Flash APIs beginning about 08:11 Beijing time on October 15, 2026, saying the cause had been identified and a fix was being implemented. Third-party monitors and users in several countries reported slow or missing replies. QbitAI reported that a newly created Bilibili account named DeepSeekHarness appeared around the same time; DeepSeek Harness is DeepSeek's open-source agent runtime, and QbitAI said there is no official evidence linking the outage to a model or Harness launch.
- DeepSeek updates its open-source repos, adding Huawei Ascend support
DeepSeek pushed updates across most of its open-source kernel and communication libraries on GitHub, adding Huawei Ascend support through new DeepGEMM-Ascend and DeepEP-Ascend repositories, alongside updates to FlashMLA, DeepGEMM, DeepEP, DeepSelect and TileKernels, plus a new DeepJIT library for xPU kernel JIT compilation, per its GitHub repos.