DHS to ban DeepSeek from federal civilian agencies

The Department of Homeland Security is banning the use of Chinese AI model DeepSeek and its affiliates by civilian federal agencies.

The notice, set to publish Tuesday in the Federal Register, cites the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Act and a review by the Federal Acquisition Security Council to bar federal agencies from buying all information technology products and services from parent company Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence.

The notice includes a copy of a letter from Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin ordering the exclusion of DeepSeek products on June 26, indicating the ban has been in place for months.  

Mullin claimed that DeepSeek’s models present “multiple threat vectors” to civilian federal agency IT systems. Some are unique to the company’s country of origin, while others identify potential privacy and mass data collection concerns that could also apply to other Chinese and U.S. AI models.

He said DeepSeek models store data in servers based in China, where national security laws give the Chinese government wide latitude to request and obtain data from domestic companies. Models hosted directly by DeepSeek collect personally identifiable information from users and trace their “digital fingerprints” online. And like every other major AI model on the market, DeepSeek relies on a “prompt and response” process, something Mullin said “may result in the transfer of sensitive data” to the Chinese government.

“The transfer of the aforementioned information to the [People’s Republic of China], either independently or in combination with publicly available data, could produce actionable intelligence on U.S. persons and/or government programs,” Mullin wrote.

CyberScoop had reached out to CISA and DHS for further details.

The decision will exclude federal agencies from using one of the most popular and powerful Chinese open-weight AI models more than a year after U.S. frontier AI companies and the federal government accused DeepSeek’s makers of “systematically” distilling their models.

The order requires civilian agencies to exclude DeepSeek products from future procurements while removing any versions that might have been put in place prior to the ban. In the past, federal agencies have used their own discretion to block the use of models like DeepSeek, as the Department of Commerce confirmed to FedScoop last year.

Agencies can request exceptions, but must submit their request 60 days in advance and must provide a “compelling justification” for the action, like an inability to fulfill a mission-critical function, or other national security considerations.

Mullin also said agencies that remove DeepSeek from their IT are “encouraged” to enhance their security controls to protect against the possibility that their networks were compromised through the Chinese AI tool.

“During the period between the issuance of this order and full removal of covered articles from agency systems, federal agencies are encouraged to take steps to address risk to their systems, such as monitoring the flow of traffic in and out of the agency, implementing enhanced logging and controls on data exfiltration for the relevant systems, and detecting and flagging anomalous activity,” he wrote.”

DeepSeek is the only Chinese AI model named in the order, but it’s just one of several Chinese open weight AI models that have worried national security officials or have been accused of illegally distilling U.S. models, along with Moonshot AI, the makers of Kimi and Alibaba, makers of Qwen.