There's a thing called "local laws and regulations" that you need to comply with to be able to operate in China. It's plain and simple - without this level of limitation, once the model is viral it will be on the radar and then censorship will apply anyway. May as well implement that from the beginning. So I don't believe CCP is actively "involved" in this, but rather the laws impacted the behavior of the company.

Microsoft apply censorship to Bing search results in China. It doesn't mean they are controlled by CCP. They just got impacted by law and they want to keep operate in China.

The question is whether the weights they've released have such censorship in the training data, for which future users would be unable to detect nor remove.

I don't care that deepseek's own service has censorship. I would care, if they have this censored weights but haven't revealed it was (aka, fraud by omission).

I would not be super surprised if they intend to do, but I felt that's going to be very hard to implement. The censorship very likely comes from another layer.