how is that different from US AI that self censors and is banned from release by their emperors?

That's the fundamental difference with open models, anybody can run and tune them any way they like. The real difference in philosophy is that Americans companies treat the model as the product, while Chinese companies see models at infrastructure you build products on top of. You amortize the cost of deploying it at scale by sharing knowledge and iterating quickly to bring the cost down.

Deepseek's base models aren't censored.

I don’t need an AI to tell me about Tiananmen Square. I need it to do boring grunt work.