DHS Orders DeepSeek Purged From Every Federal Civilian Agency
DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order
A new Department of Homeland Security order bars federal civilian agencies from buying any products or services from Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co. and its affiliates, and requires removing all DeepSeek tools—along with third-party products built on DeepSeek—from agency IT systems. Issued under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act after a Federal Acquisition Security Council review, the order takes effect with publication in the Federal Register.
The Secretary of Homeland Security has ordered removal of all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations, from civilian agency information technology.
- neuronexmachina
When it says civilian agencies are ordered to purge all "third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations", what does that actually mean? Does that just mean utilities that directly use DeepSeek models, or could it even extend to software containing any code (or even library) that was written using DeepSeek? Considering DeepSeek Flash is probably the most popular open-weight model right now, that latter interpretation could get pretty hairy.
- kidfiji
Please excuse my lack of full context, but if the weights are open and the model can be self hosted, what’s the actual security risk for that case? Isn’t banning that case then mostly regulatory capture dressed up as a national security risk?
- ssivark
Why specifically DeepSeek, when there's a whole cohort of Chinese open weights models? GLM, Qwen, Kimi, Minimax, etc.
- anon373839
The timing of this is unsurprising, with Anthropic’s Q3 revenues flattening out and the IPO in jeopardy. I expect more efforts to prop up the money-furnace labs in the coming days.
- himata4113
This appears to ban deepseek first party usage, not the model itself. It specifically mentions the iOS app as well.
- jacquesm
The models may well contain malware or security vulnerabilities. But they are at least open to inspection because the weights are available, the same can not be said about US providers of inference such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
- throw0101c
> The order's summary of risks says DeepSeek's servers are in China and that Chinese law "permits extensive authority to government cyber and intelligence functions to access private company infrastructure".
So the Chinese version of the American CLOUD Act?
- gavinray
Here's the transcription of the reasoning:
> Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd. (hereinafter DeepSeek), a foreign, privately-owned company, located in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides multiple artificial intelligence applications available widely and free of charge. DeepSeek’s models present multiple threat vectors. DeepSeek servers are located in the PRC, and the PRC legal system permits extensive authority to government cyber and intelligence functions to access private company infrastructure. For DeepSeek-hosted instances of their models, DeepSeek’s account generation process collects personally identifiable information (PII) and may also track and digitally fingerprint users. DeepSeek’s most widely used applications function through a prompt-and-response process that requires presenting information to the model, and which may result in the transfer of sensitive data to the PRC if used by U.S. government employees or vendors. The transfer of the aforementioned information to the PRC, either independently or in combination with publicly available data, could produce actionable intelligence on U.S. persons and/or government programs. The models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities. Indeed, open-source security research has found that the DeepSeek iOS mobile application contains multiple critical vulnerabilities.