US Government Bans Chinese AI DeepSeek from Its Agencies

The US Department of Homeland Security has prohibited civilian government agencies from acquiring or using DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence models. Its notice gave no reason for the decision, although concerns have been raised about potential cybersecurity risks; no incidents have been reported so far. OpenAI and Anthropic have accused DeepSeek of imitating their models through distillation, a method that uses large numbers of queries to reproduce an AI’s outputs. The ban does not cover the military or intelligence services and comes amid growing technological competition between the United States and China.