US Orders Civilian Agencies to Rip DeepSeek Out of Government Systems

What it claims

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told federal civilian agencies on Monday, in October 2026, to remove DeepSeek from their IT systems and stop buying it. The order covers DeepSeek's own app and any third-party service built on the model. DHS describes "multiple threat vectors." It says use by employees or vendors "may result in the transfer of sensitive data to the PRC" and could yield "actionable intelligence on U.S. persons and/or government agencies."

Scope for anyone selling to government

The ban is defined by the model, not by where it runs. The article notes that DeepSeek's weights are open and can be run locally or by any provider. Perplexity, for example, serves it from US servers. Only DeepSeek.com's own service runs on servers in China. Even so, the order names "third-party services developed using it," so US hosting does not by itself exempt a product. Vendors with civilian-agency customers need to know whether a DeepSeek model sits anywhere in their stack.

A July 2026 DHS memo, made public the same day, had already told agencies to monitor traffic in and out of government websites for DeepSeek-related risks. That points to network-level detection as well as procurement controls.

Context the article adds

• Earlier restrictions: the Commerce Department and the Navy banned DeepSeek on government devices. New York, Tennessee and Virginia took similar steps. Italy's data protection authority ordered the chatbot blocked in early 2025 and called DeepSeek's privacy answers "totally insufficient."
• Allegations: in April 2025 the House select committee on the CCP alleged that DeepSeek secretly sends American user data to the Chinese government. The committee also said DeepSeek may have used about 60,000 Nvidia chips, 20,000 of them restricted under US export controls.
• Current models: the V4-Pro preview (April 2026) is priced about 98% below OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Pro and is released under the MIT license. An updated V4.1-Flash, aimed at efficiency, shipped the week of the order.
• Related policy: the FCC votes on October 29 on barring all Chinese labs from testing electronics for US use.

Limits

The article does not quote the order's text or give its formal name. It does not say whether the order defines "built on" to include fine-tuned or distilled derivatives. It gives no deadline for removal and does not say whether contractors' internal use is covered. The data-transfer claims are allegations from DHS and the House committee. The article reports no technical evidence for them, and the Chinese Embassy did not comment.