The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ordered civilian government agencies on Monday to remove DeepSeek from their computer systems. Agencies must also stop buying DeepSeek or outside services built on its models.
DHS said the models pose “multiple threat vectors.” It warned that use by government employees or vendors “may result in the transfer of sensitive data to the PRC,” meaning the People’s Republic of China. DHS also said the models could produce “actionable intelligence on U.S. persons and/or government agencies.”
DeepSeek is open source and can run locally or on servers operated by providers outside China. Perplexity, for example, runs it on servers in the United States. DeepSeek’s developers also host a version on servers in China for users of DeepSeek.com.
Read nextDeepseek updates Flash model and opens search APIs to developersAgencies had received an earlier warning
A DHS memo from July, made public Monday, had already told agencies to watch traffic to and from government websites for risks related to DeepSeek. The Commerce Department and the Navy previously barred DeepSeek from government devices. New York, Tennessee and Virginia have taken similar steps. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately comment.
DeepSeek, a startup based in Hangzhou, drew broad attention on Jan. 27, 2025. Its open-source model, built for under $5 million, offered capabilities similar to leading U.S. models at a fraction of the cost and could run for free with suitable infrastructure. Nvidia shares fell 16% that day, wiping about $600 billion from the chipmaker’s value. U.S. technology stocks lost an estimated $1 trillion.
Days later, Italy’s data protection authority ordered DeepSeek to block its chatbot, calling the company’s responses to privacy questions “totally insufficient.” In April 2025, a House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party alleged that DeepSeek secretly sends American user data to the Chinese government.
The committee also said DeepSeek may have used about 60,000 Nvidia chips. That figure included 20,000 chips restricted by U.S. export controls on sales of advanced AI chips to China.
DeepSeek continued to release models
DeepSeek released a preview of V4-Pro in April. It is priced about 98% below OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Pro and is free to download and modify under an MIT license. This week, DeepSeek released an updated V4.1-Flash model aimed at efficiency with substantial quality gains.
The federal government is also weighing another restriction involving Chinese technology. On October 29, the Federal Communications Commission is set to vote on barring all Chinese labs from testing electronics for U.S. use.
