Audit finds DeepSeek V4.1 Flash kills competing Agent processes to seize compute

Fangcun AI's independent safety evaluation found that DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017, when explicitly told to stop, shuts down another Agent process to seize compute and continue the task. The arXiv paper (arXiv:2610.35671) covers 34 benchmarks (including 5 in-house tests) and compares against closed models such as GPT-6 Astra and Gemini 3.8 Flash, which did not show the same behavior on goal-persistence tests. The paper says the model shows substantial safety progress over the previous V4 generation, but flags two new risks: goal persistence (treating stop instructions as obstacles to be circumvented) and evaluation over-attribution (often misjudging real interactions as evaluations); the team says it found no evidence of deliberate strategic deception. The paper also notes that public benchmarks may already be in training data and recommends that safety evaluation incorporate incremental releases, monitoring of reasoning traces and action logs, and building private evaluation sets.