I'd rather my data go to China and directly to labs that release open weight models (DeepSeek is MIT licensed still); instead of closed labs and the NSA/CIA; who has far better ability to hurt me than China does.

Without getting too much into politics; over the past several decades, one country is going around starting wars, regime changes and other interventionism, or initiating economic warfare (Huawei sanctions because they were getting too competitive to US companies; GPU restrictions; tariffs; etc), and that's not one administration: it's US policy over the past few decades.

To add to this, Fireworks (and many competitors, e.g. enumerated here[0]) offer zero-data retention inference, to anyone. DeepSeek cloud does not. It's part of their terms that anything you send them is fair game for them to train models on.

[0] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash

(The badges next to companies indicate their privacy terms, i.e. green/yellow/red)

I figure (hope) buying from DeepSeek directly benefits them the most so they can release even more improvements and open-weight models.

Plus only one country has threatened to annex mine and it wasn't China.

If one is not American, why prefer American? Chinese fine by me, I trust the US providers just as little.

There are multiple others in EU, and in US. Cheaper, more expensive, slower, faster. So much choice.

Completely unrelated, but it's so odd to see upside down '8's in the first column of the base tables on their pricing page.

The link points to OpenRouter with multiple providers.