Flo Crivello runs San Francisco startup Lindy.ai, which develops AI assistants to manage e-mails, arrange meetings and handle other routine tasks. As the company attracted more customers, its cost of using AI grew faster than expected; by the middle of this year, its spending on Anthropic had exceeded the combined salaries of more than two dozen employees, with Crivello telling NPR in July that "By far, our No.1 expense was Anthropic." The company eventually moved its AI workloads to DeepSeek-V4, an open-weight long-context reasoning model released by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek in April, which Crivello said reduced inference costs to one 10th of their previous level, saving millions of dollars. On October 19, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an order requiring federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products and related third-party services from their information technology systems and prohibiting future procurement, citing "cybersecurity concerns," including the so-called possibility that sensitive information could be transferred to China. Yet proposals to further restrict Chinese AI models have encountered opposition from parts of the American technology industry, with some companies warning that losing access to affordable models will increase operating costs and make it harder to compete with larger rivals.