US Orders Federal Agencies to Remove DeepSeek AI

The US government is moving to remove DeepSeek technology from federal civilian agency systems, extending its restrictions beyond the Chinese AI company’s own products to some third-party services built using its implementations. The action is set out in a Department of Homeland Security notice scheduled for publication on October 20. China has objected to the move, turning a procurement decision into another point of friction in the wider AI contest between the two countries.

The timing matters. The underlying DHS order dates to July 24, but the notice became public this week. It would be misleading to describe the policy as a decision made for the first time on Tuesday. What is new for the public is the formal disclosure of its scope and China’s response.

According to the Federal Register notice, federal civilian agencies must exclude information technology products and services developed by DeepSeek and affiliated entities from procurement. The order also calls for the removal of DeepSeek-related products and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations from agency IT. That second provision could matter to government contractors and software suppliers that incorporated DeepSeek technology into larger products, although the precise impact will depend on how agencies apply the order.

This is not a nationwide prohibition on Americans downloading DeepSeek or on private companies using its models. The distinction is important because DeepSeek’s openly available models can be deployed in different ways, including on infrastructure outside China. The US action addresses federal civilian procurement and systems, not every possible use of the technology.

The notice cites supply-chain and information-security concerns. Those are the government’s stated reasons, not proof that every deployment of a DeepSeek model sends data to China. A model’s weights, the application around it, the hosting location and the organisation operating it can all affect the actual risk. Agencies will now have to decide how to audit those layers in products they already use.

China criticised the US restriction on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. The dispute lands at a time when both countries are trying to strengthen their domestic AI ecosystems, from chips and data centres to the models running on them. Washington’s latest move shows that model origin and supply-chain trust are becoming procurement questions, not simply technical ones.

For developers, the practical lesson is that an open or low-cost model is not automatically acceptable for every customer. A government buyer may ask where a model came from, who can update it, where inference runs and whether components can be replaced. That pressure could favour vendors that can document their model supply chain and offer deployment choices.

TechBooky has previously covered DeepSeek’s efforts to reduce dependence on outside chip suppliers. This new US order shows the other side of that independence drive: even as Chinese AI companies build more of their own technology, access to important foreign customers may depend on political and security decisions beyond benchmark performance.