By PYMNTS | October 19, 2026
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued an order banning federal civilian agencies from acquiring products and services developed by DeepSeek and requiring them to remove the company’s products from their information technology.
DHS included these requirements in a notice of order posted Tuesday (Oct. 19) on the Federal Register’s public inspection site and scheduled to be published in the Federal Register Tuesday (Oct. 20).
The order cited the Federal Supply Chain Security Act of 2018, which allows DHS to manage supply chain risks by recommending that risky products or services be excluded or removed from federal procurement or IT systems.
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It said DeepSeek is a privately owned company located in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and that the company’s models “present multiple threat vectors.” These include PRC laws that allow the government to access private company infrastructure, an account-generation process that collects personally identifiable information and a prompt-and-response process that requires the user to present information to the model.
“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,” DHS said in the order. “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.”
Reuters reported in February 2025 that as DeepSeek quickly rose to prominence and became one of the most downloaded AI applications worldwide, it was met with growing security concerns that prompted multiple governments to ban or investigate it.
Australia, Taiwan and Italy were among the first countries to take action against DeepSeek. In the United States, Texas became the first state to prohibit DeepSeek on government-issued devices.
The U.S. Department of Commerce banned the use of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence model on government-furnished equipment in March 2025, Reuters reported at the time.
Other U.S. officials, members of Congress and states had expressed similar concerns about DeepSeek.
CNBC reported in July that U.S. lawmakers and national security officials were alarmed by some companies in the U.S. turning to lower-cost Chinese AI models.