DeepSeek Dodges the U.S. Blacklist While Banks Block AI in Hong Kong

Emma Reed: This is the Bri Podcast. I'm Emma Reed.

Marcus Hale: And I'm Marcus Hale.

Marcus Hale: Today we're tracking the U.S. Commerce Department's decision to hold off on blacklisting Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, a major ransomware attack on Novo Nordisk that started at a contract manufacturer, and why Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs just blocked their Hong Kong staff from using Claude.

Emma Reed: A U.S. Commerce Department official confirmed they're holding off on adding the Chinese AI company DeepSeek to a trade blacklist at least for now.

Marcus Hale: Right, and what makes this unusual is it follows a push from some lawmakers who wanted the firm restricted over its AI models that quietly matched American systems on key benchmarks early this year.

Emma Reed: The official line is that the Bureau of Industry and Security reviewed the case and decided a listing couldn't be justified under the current export control criteria.

Marcus Hale: So it isn't a permanent pass. The door is open to revisit it if the Commerce Department gets new evidence of a national security problem, but right now DeepSeek isn't on the entity list.

Emma Reed: One concrete consequence is that American cloud providers and chip firms can still do business with the company without seeking a special license, which keeps a steady revenue line open both ways.

Emma Reed: Let's shift to a pair of data-security stories that really tie back to the same problem inside big companies: controlling your own models and your own secrets.

Marcus Hale: Right, and the sharpest example is a straight extortion case out of Denmark. Novo Nordisk confirmed an internal data breach — roughly one and a half terabytes — and the attackers are demanding twenty-five million dollars in ransom.

Emma Reed: And the detail that makes this a policy story, not just a crime note, is how the intruders got in. They reportedly used compromised employee credentials to reach systems at a contract manufacturer.

Marcus Hale: So supply-chain digital access — one trusted partner’s weak spot becomes the whole firm’s open door. For a pharma giant that handles trial data and proprietary process records, having one-point-three terabytes walked out is numbers you can’t handwave.

Emma Reed: The concrete consequence? Even if payment doesn’t happen, the breach forces Novo to harden every third-party SaaS and manufacturing link — which means cost, project delays, and a lot of security architecture rework across the business.

Marcus Hale: That same 'control the pipes' logic played out in a totally different sector in the same window. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs both told Hong Kong-based staff they're blocked from using Anthropic's models — specifically Claude, the large language model the banks already license.

Emma Reed: And listen to why this is more than a routine tool ban. It's about location, not about the model's quality.

Emma Reed: The rule follows an existing block on OpenAI's ChatGPT in Hong Kong — both driven by fears that local regulators or government security laws could compel access to prompts or data transiting through regional cloud infrastructure.

Marcus Hale: So you have two top-tier investment banks saying: we’ll use the model, but not on devices or networks tied to a jurisdiction where our client data might face sovereign reach.

Emma Reed: Exactly. The event, in short: a policy flag went up after a review, and Anthropic joins OpenAI on the restricted list for Hong Kong desks.

Marcus Hale: And the one context point that ties all of this together — whether it's Novo Nordisk's stolen terabytes or bank employees typing into an AI assistant — is that in 2025, data exposure risk is being decided less by network firewalls and more by which legal territory you're connected through and whose hardware runs the session.

Emma Reed: So the first thing catching my eye this morning — Apple is reportedly preparing to raise prices.

Marcus Hale: Yeah, and this isn't the usual annual iPhone bump. The reporting suggests it's a direct tariff response, specifically to the new US duties on goods assembled in places like Vietnam and India.

Emma Reed: Right. Those countries had become the workaround — Apple shifted some production out of China precisely to avoid earlier tariffs. Now the net is widening.

Marcus Hale: And that timing is rough, because a separate datapoint just landed showing Chinese automakers are about to cross ten percent of all new car sales in Europe.

Emma Reed: So you're watching a single dynamic from two angles: Asian manufacturers, whether phones or cars, are hitting a squeeze where costs are rising just as their export growth is becoming undeniable.

Marcus Hale: Exactly. The car stat is a forecast — ten percent is the threshold Europe's own industry has called an existential threat. Meanwhile, Apple's price move is the concrete consequence of the new tariff reality hitting a consumer-facing price tag first.

Emma Reed: Marcus, this one is sitting quietly in the firmware layer but needs attention soon. Three Secure Boot certificates are approaching expiration, and the impact depends entirely on whether your device's bootloader has picked up the latest update.

Marcus Hale: Right, and Secure Boot is that UEFI check that makes sure your operating system hasn’t been tampered with before the kernel even loads. The three expiring certs tie back to a Microsoft third-party signing authority used to vouch for bootloaders, particularly across Linux dual-boot setups.

Emma Reed: If the bootloader blocks the expired signature, your machine doesn’t just fail a check — it might refuse to boot the OS entirely.

Marcus Hale: Which is exactly what happened in 2023 when an older certificate expired and some Ubuntu and Debian users were left staring at a black screen.

Marcus Hale: The concrete fix is already shipping through updated shim binaries and distribution patches — but only if people apply them before the deadline.

Emma Reed: A well-known French physicist and science communicator, who goes by the name "Science Étonnante," has just been stripped of his PhD after an investigation found plagiarism in his 2013 dissertation.

Marcus Hale: That’s the University of Paris-Saclay’s final disciplinary decision, and it’s a concrete fall from a really public platform. He built his audience by explaining science clearly, often citing his own academic credentials to build trust.

Emma Reed: The university confirmed two retracted papers, one from 2015 and one from 2016, which had already led to a one-year suspension from public duties. The return to his own thesis is what escalated things.

Marcus Hale: Exactly—and the immediate consequence is that he can no longer present himself as "Dr." or hold any position tied to that degree, which effectively undercuts the authority of a science communicator who was followed by millions.

Emma Reed: Researchers just pushed the timeline on plague way back —like, roughly five and a half thousand years earlier than we thought.

Marcus Hale: And not by a little. They found Yersinia pestis in a hunter-gatherer who died in Latvia about five thousand years ago, which makes it the oldest known plague strain.

Emma Reed: The key is it was missing the gene that lets fleas transmit plague, so this version probably spread through bites or droplets rather than the classic flea-rat-human chain.

Marcus Hale: Which means the pathogen was already moving through human populations thousands of years before it caused the big pandemics, just with a different transmission kit.

Emma Reed: So the question 'where did Earth's oceans come from' sounds almost too big to ask, but there's a specific new angle here around water delivery after the giant impact that formed the Moon.

Marcus Hale: Right. We're really talking about the late veneer stage. The idea is that after the magma ocean cooled, Earth got pummeled one more time by material similar to enstatite chondrites.

Emma Reed: And those are dry meteorites that somehow delivered hydrogen enough for a few oceans of water, just through a tiny bit of retained water in their minerals.

Marcus Hale: Exactly. The concrete consequence is a revised delivery mechanism: it removes the need to invoke wet carbonaceous chondrites as the main source, which shifts how we picture the whole early solar system's water budget.

Emma Reed: So today we went from a U.S. decision not to blacklist DeepSeek, to a ransomware attack hitting a pharmaceutical giant through a contract manufacturer's credentials, then to investment banks blocking AI tools in Hong Kong because of where the data lives.

Marcus Hale: We saw Apple preparing to raise prices as tariffs spread beyond China, a quiet firmware expiry that could lock people out of their own machines, a science communicator losing his PhD over plagiarism, plague origins pushed back five thousand years, and a new theory on how Earth got its oceans.