DHS Orders DeepSeek Out of Federal Civilian Agencies

The US government has ordered DeepSeek out of its civilian agencies. A notice in the Federal Register on 20 October says the Secretary of Homeland Security has issued an order that does two things: it bars federal civilian agencies from buying information technology products and services developed by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd. and its affiliates, and it requires them to remove all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products from the IT systems they already run. The notice is signed by James H. Percival II, the department’s general counsel.

The legal tool is the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018, which lets the government shut a vendor out of federal procurement after a review by the Federal Acquisition Security Council. The notice says the Secretary acted after reviewing that council’s recommendation “and affiliated evidence”. Implementation sits with a team in the Cybersecurity Division of CISA. The signed order is posted in docket DHS-2026-0628 on regulations.gov; the public notice itself does not set out a compliance deadline.

The reach goes past DeepSeek’s own apps

The broadest part of the order is its second clause. Agencies must also remove “third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations”. DeepSeek publishes its model weights openly, and its models, including the V4 family, are built into tools sold by other companies. That makes the order an inventory problem as much as a ban: an agency has to find out which of the products it buys run on DeepSeek underneath. According to TechCrunch, agencies can ask for exceptions.

TechCrunch reports that DHS pointed to national security concerns tied to DeepSeek’s operations in China, warning that sensitive data from US government users could be reached by Chinese authorities under Chinese law. The order extends a restriction that Congress wrote into law in December 2025, which kept DeepSeek out of national security systems in the intelligence community, to the rest of the civilian government. It also follows the joint NSA, CISA and FBI advisory in September that named DeepSeek among six Chinese AI companies accused of large-scale distillation of American models, a practice Anthropic had described in its own report on distillation attacks.

Beijing answered the same day. At the Foreign Ministry’s regular briefing, spokesperson Mao Ning said China opposes “overstretching the concept of national security and politicizing technology and trade issues” and would “resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises.” The exchange comes days after Bloomberg reported on 16 October that China is weighing export controls on 23 AI-related technologies, including models, chips and agents.

The order binds only federal civilian executive agencies. States, which have set their own rules on DeepSeek since early 2025, and private companies are outside it, and government is a small slice of the market for a company whose revenue run rate reached $1 billion on demand from developers worldwide. What changes is the paperwork for every vendor selling AI software to Washington: from now on, a product built on DeepSeek’s open weights is a product federal buyers have been told to remove.