Despite the controversy surrounding the Chinese open-source model, it has received the blessing of US companies that say their versions of it are safer and feature less censorship.

Distilled R1 models can now run locally on Copilot Plus PCs, starting with Qualcomm Snapdragon X first and Intel chips later. This brings a lot more AI capabilities to Windows, and it’s something Microsoft was already working on with its Phi Silica language models.

Microsoft confirmed it will bring the DeepSeek R1 model to Azure cloud and GitHub in a move that it hopes will lessen its reliance on OpenAI's models.