DHS orders civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek and bans new purchases

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ordered civilian government agencies on Monday to remove DeepSeek products from government computer systems. The order also covers third-party services developed using DeepSeek. DHS barred new purchases of DeepSeek and services built on the model.

DHS said the models pose multiple security threats. DHS warned that government employees or vendors using the models may transfer sensitive data to the People's Republic of China. DHS said such use could produce actionable intelligence on U.S. persons or government agencies. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately comment.

DeepSeek is an open-source model that can run locally or through any hosting provider, including providers outside China. Perplexity, for example, runs its own servers in the United States. However, DeepSeek's developers host the version available through DeepSeek's own service on servers in China.

A July DHS memo, made public Monday, had already directed agencies to monitor traffic entering and leaving government websites for DeepSeek-related risks. The Commerce Department and the Navy previously banned DeepSeek on government devices. New York, Tennessee and Virginia have taken similar steps. The Federal Communications Commission votes on October 29 on barring all Chinese laboratories from testing electronics for U.S. use, amid a wider federal push against China's technology.

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek became widely known on January 27, 2025, when its open-source model, built for under $5 million, drove Nvidia's stock down 16%. The decline erased about $600 billion of Nvidia's value. U.S. technology companies collectively lost an estimated $1 trillion that day because DeepSeek demonstrated capabilities similar to leading U.S. models at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek's model could also run for free on suitable infrastructure.

Italy's data protection authority ordered DeepSeek to block its chatbot days later, calling DeepSeek's answers to privacy questions "totally insufficient." In April 2025, a House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party alleged that DeepSeek secretly sends American user data to China's government. The committee also said DeepSeek may have used about 60,000 Nvidia chips, including 20,000 restricted under U.S. export controls. Those controls bar sales of the most advanced AI chips to China.

DeepSeek released a preview of its V4-Pro model in April at a price about 98% below OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Pro. The V4-Pro preview is free to download and modify under an MIT license. DeepSeek released an updated V4.1-Flash model this week, aimed at efficiency with large quality improvements.