U.S. orders federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek and products built on its technology

The United States has ordered federal civilian agencies to stop purchasing services and products developed by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek and to remove them from government IT systems. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the decision stems from national security concerns linked to the company's operations in China.

The order goes beyond banning DeepSeek's own product: it also covers third-party products and services built on DeepSeek technology. Agencies may request exemptions.

DHS raised concerns about the handling of user data. According to the order, sensitive information belonging to US government users could be made accessible to Chinese authorities under Chinese law.

This step broadens earlier restrictions. A law passed in December 2025 already targeted the use of DeepSeek in intelligence national security systems. The new order extends the limits to federal civilian agencies and covers both new purchases and existing IT systems.

China pushed back. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Tuesday that Beijing opposes "overstretching the concept of national security and politicizing technology and trade issues." She added: "We will firmly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies."

The move comes amid increasingly fierce US-China technology competition in AI. DeepSeek challenges US rivals such as OpenAI and Meta with low-cost open-weight models. Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg, China is reportedly considering export restrictions on 23 AI-related technologies, including chip designs and certain advanced models, to address security and misuse risks.

DeepSeek has been under scrutiny from governments and regulators worldwide since its R1 reasoning model shook the industry in January 2025 and triggered a sharp drop in Nvidia's shares.

According to a September report, the US accused DeepSeek and five other Chinese AI companies, including Alibaba and Moonshot AI, of using large-scale model distillation to extract information from US AI systems. Distillation is a technique that uses the outputs of one AI model to train another.

OpenAI and Anthropic have separately raised concerns about DeepSeek's alleged use of distillation. Earlier this year, OpenAI told US lawmakers it had observed suspicious attempts by DeepSeek to distill its models, while Anthropic said it had identified unauthorized attempts by DeepSeek and other Chinese labs to harvest Claude outputs.

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