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Abstract
DeepSeek recently released R1, a high-performing large language model (LLM)
optimized for reasoning tasks. Despite its efficient training pipeline, R1
achieves competitive performance, even surpassing leading reasoning models like
OpenAI's o1 on several benchmarks. However, emerging reports suggest that R1
refuses to answer certain prompts related to politically sensitive topics in
China. While existing LLMs often implement safeguards to avoid generating
harmful or offensive outputs, R1 represents a notable shift - exhibiting
censorship-like behavior on politically charged queries. In this paper, we
investigate this phenomenon by first introducing a large-scale set of heavily
curated prompts that get censored by R1, covering a range of politically
sensitive topics, but are not censored by other models. We then conduct a
comprehensive analysis of R1's censorship patterns, examining their
consistency, triggers, and variations across topics, prompt phrasing, and
context. Beyond English-language queries, we explore censorship behavior in
other languages. We also investigate the transferability of censorship to
models distilled from the R1 language model. Finally, we propose techniques for
bypassing or removing this censorship. Our findings reveal possible additional
censorship integration likely shaped by design choices during training or
alignment, raising concerns about transparency, bias, and governance in
language model deployment.