DHS will ban federal civilian agencies from using DeepSeek

DHS will prohibit federal civilian agencies from procuring information technology products and services from DeepSeek and its parent company under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Act. The notice is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on Tuesday and is accompanied by an exclusion order signed by DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on June 26, indicating the ban has been in effect for several months. Mullin said DeepSeek models pose multiple threat vectors to federal civilian agency IT systems, including data storage on servers in China, collection of users' personally identifiable information, and the potential transmission of sensitive data to the Chinese government during prompts and responses. The order requires agencies to exclude DeepSeek products from future procurements and to remove versions that may have been deployed before the ban; exception requests must be submitted 60 days in advance with sufficient justification; agencies are also encouraged to strengthen traffic monitoring, logging and detection of anomalous activity. DeepSeek is the only Chinese AI model named in the order, but Moonshot AI's Kimi and Alibaba's Qwen have likewise drawn concern from national security officials.