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The United States has ordered all artificial intelligence (AI) technology from Chinese company DeepSeek to be removed from most government systems.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has banned civilian government agencies from using Deep Search and any technology developed with its AI models.
As a powerful and open source AI model, DeepSeek can be deployed for free and has low cost of use, so it has always been regarded as a disruptive force in the current AI technology competition.
While the Department of Homeland Security notice did not detail specific security concerns surrounding DeepSeek, the White House has criticized Chinese AI companies this year.
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The BBC has contacted the Department of Homeland Security, DeepSeek and the Chinese Embassy in the United States for response.
The Department of Homeland Security announced the order on Monday (October 19), but the ban has been in effect since the end of July.
The order applies to civilian agencies, including the Treasury, State and Justice departments, but does not apply to agencies under the Department of Defense.
The ban comes after the Trump administration and U.S. companies criticized China's AI.
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White House technology director Michael Kratsios wrote in an internal memo earlier this year that U.S. AI companies have been subject to "malicious exploitation," mainly from Chinese rivals.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to be listed on the public market in the next few months. The two companies also claimed that some Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, actually copied their AI models.
U.S. President Donald Trump has made it clear that he considers China to be the United States' main competitor when it comes to the development of AI, which he believes is critical to America's future.
Since its first public launch in 2025, DeepSeek's popularity has continued to rise, with demand for its models so strong that it once even caused the company's servers to crash.
DeepSeek's free chatbot application ranks high on the Apple App Store download rankings, and its AI models are also used by U.S. technology companies. Companies such as Snowflake, Vercel and OpenRouter have integrated DeepSeek into the services they provide to customers.
Startups are also adopting open source models like DeepSeek.
For technology companies or AI developers, the cost of using DeepSeek in their work is a fraction of the cost of closed-source models such as Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude or OpenAI Codex.
Similarly, the costs incurred by DeepSeek in developing its models are far lower than the funds invested by American AI companies in developing their own models.
Last year, DeepSeek said it cost about $6 million to train its first version of the model, while costs associated with OpenAI GPT-4 were about $100 million. The disclosures sent technology stocks sharply lower.
The latest version of DeepSeek was released last week. Users of the model have praised it online, saying it outperforms even OpenAI's most advanced AI tools at common tasks like computer software programming.
This article was originally written in English. We used artificial intelligence to assist in translation and was reviewed by BBC journalists before publication. Learn more about how we use artificial intelligence.
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