US DHS Bans DeepSeek Products and Derivatives for Civilian Federal Agencies
The US Department of Homeland Security has ordered civilian federal agencies to remove and ban all DeepSeek products, including third-party services developed using them, raising concerns about AI supply chain compliance.
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According to a report by German tech media outlet heise online, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has banned civilian federal agencies from using any products from Chinese AI company DeepSeek. The directive requires existing implementations to be removed from IT systems and explicitly covers third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations.
The DHS attributes this measure to the risk that sensitive government data could be transferred to China, as well as potential malware or security vulnerabilities in the models. However, the broad wording of the ban raises practical questions regarding enforcement: what exactly constitutes "developed using DeepSeek"? Does it refer only to software integrating DeepSeek models via API, or does it also include applications where developers used DeepSeek merely as an aid during programming or testing? Furthermore, if agencies use AI gateway services like OpenRouter that automatically route requests to various model providers, DeepSeek models could be inadvertently utilized.
This move marks the latest attempt by US institutions to restrict DeepSeek's market access. Discussions on banning DeepSeek for various entities have been ongoing, with some measures already implemented. Meanwhile, China recently published a draft proposing restrictions on the export of certain AI technologies. DeepSeek is working to reduce its dependence on Nvidia's chip ecosystem by releasing open-source programming tools for Huawei's Ascend series AI accelerators.