The U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Department of Justice and the Department of State must remove China's AI DeepSeek from computers
Trésor, Justice, État : l'IA chinoise DeepSeek doit disparaître des ordinateurs de l'administration américaine
The US Department of Homeland Security has made public an order requiring all federal civilian agencies to stop procuring DeepSeek and remove it from their information systems; the order also covers third-party software built on DeepSeek technology. The order was signed by Secretary Markwayne Mullin on July 24 and made public on October 19, is based on the 2018 Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act, and agencies may apply for exceptions. The stated reason is national security, with concern that sensitive data of federal employees could be obtained by Chinese authorities because servers are located in China. Because DeepSeek has published the V3 and R1 weights on Hugging Face and GitHub, the order is vague on whether it applies to locally deployed models, and gateways such as OpenRouter may also let agencies call DeepSeek without knowing it. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning called this an abuse of the concept of national security.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security requires federal civilian agencies to stop using DeepSeek, and also covers third-party software built on its models, showing the enforcement difficulties of open-weight models under procurement bans.