Policy · 4h ago
DHS has formalized its June 26 exclusion of DeepSeek from federal civilian agencies, requiring them to remove existing deployments and bar future purchases—including third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations. The order uses federal supply-chain authority and applies to agency procurement, not non-federal organizations.
The order does not explain whether “developed using” covers a service that continues calling DeepSeek through an application programming interface (API) or software built with its models. The Register reports that gateways such as OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway can select providers automatically; a request routed to DeepSeek could reach the model even when an agency did not choose it directly. Procurement records may not show which model actually handles prompts.
For civilian agencies using these gateways or embedded AI services, the order may reach beyond a list of DeepSeek subscriptions, while its undefined wording leaves uncertain which downstream tools count. DHS’s concerns about possible prompt-data transfers and storage in China are not evidence that agency information was accessed; that risk question is separate from the compliance boundary.
2 sources covering this story
DeepSeek deep-sixed at all US federal civilian agencies
Order disallowing use of Chinese AI service is unhelpfully vague and broad
DHS to ban DeepSeek from federal civilian agencies
DHS has banned Chinese AI model DeepSeek across civilian federal agencies, ordering its immediate removal over data privacy and national security risks.
Part of the PlainSec briefing for 2026-10-20