The U.S. Department of Homeland Security requires civil agencies to remove DeepSeek and prohibits new purchases

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) instructed U.S. civil agencies on Monday to remove products from the Chinese AI company DeepSeek from government IT systems, as well as any third-party services built on that model, and to prohibit new procurements. The notice stated that using DeepSeek could lead to the transfer of sensitive data to China and could generate intelligence targeting U.S. individuals and institutions. DHS indicated that these models constitute "multiple threat vectors."

The ban targets not only DeepSeek's own applications but also covers third-party services based on its development. A DHS memorandum from July was made public on Monday, which had previously requested agencies to monitor the risks related to DeepSeek in the traffic in and out of government websites. The U.S. Department of Commerce, the Navy, and the states of New York, Tennessee, and Virginia had previously restricted DeepSeek. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote on October 29 to decide whether to ban all Chinese laboratories from testing electronic products used in the U.S.

DeepSeek is a startup based in Hangzhou, and its open-source model attracted widespread attention on January 27, 2025, with development costs of less than $5 million, leading to a 16% drop in Nvidia's stock price that day, evaporating about $600 billion in market value. In April 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives' Special Committee on China Issues stated that DeepSeek might secretly send U.S. user data to the Chinese government and may have used about 60,000 Nvidia chips, of which 20,000 were subject to U.S. export controls. The V4-Pro model preview released by DeepSeek in April this year was priced about 98% lower than OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Pro and was made available for free download and modification under the MIT license; this week it also released an updated version of the V4.1-Flash model focused on efficiency optimization.