THE CRUNCH
The Department of Homeland Security has issued a sweeping restriction removing DeepSeek use from all federal civilian agencies and their IT systems. In a notice published with the Federal Register, DHS characterised the risks as potentially resulting in the "transfer of sensitive data" of US government employees and vendors to the Chinese government, and said DeepSeek's models could "contain malware or other security vulnerabilities."
Under the order, civilian agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Communications Commission must exclude DeepSeek products from use and remove any existing ones. The notice also bars DeepSeek from participating in federal government contracts.
The ban lands days after the Chinese AI company released its latest model, V4.1-Flash-1017, which it described as "smarter, faster, more efficient." It is not the first friction between DeepSeek and the US government: last year, two members of Congress proposed a bill that would ban the company's AI chatbot from government devices, as its cheaper models began to rival the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini.
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