US bans DeepSeek AI from government use as tech tension with China continues

The US government has ordered that all artificial intelligence (AI) technology from the Chinese company DeepSeek be removed from most government systems.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has banned civilian government agencies from using DeepSeek or any technology developed with the help of its AI models.

DeepSeek is a powerful AI model that is open source. This means people can access it freely and use it at a lower cost. It has been seen as a major force for change in the ongoing race to develop AI technology.

The DHS notice did not explain the exact security concerns about DeepSeek. However, the White House has criticised Chinese AI companies this year.

The DHS, DeepSeek and the Chinese embassy in Washington DC have been asked to comment.

The DHS announced the order on Monday, but the ban had already taken effect at the end of July.

The order applies to civilian government agencies, including the Department of the Treasury, the Department of State and the Department of Justice. However, agencies within the Department of Defense are not covered by the ban.

The ban comes after the Trump administration and American companies criticised Chinese AI technology.

Earlier this year, White House technology chief Michael Kratsios wrote in an internal memo that American AI companies were being harmed by "malicious exploitation", mainly by rival companies in China.

Anthropic and OpenAI, which are both expected to sell shares on the public stock market in the coming months, have also claimed that some Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, copied their AI models in ways that were essentially the same as the originals.

US President Donald Trump has made it clear that he sees China as the main rival to the US in AI development. He believes AI is very important to the country's future.

DeepSeek has become more popular since its first public release in 2025. Demand for its models has been so high that the company's servers have sometimes stopped working.

DeepSeek's free chatbot app is one of the most downloaded apps in Apple's App Store. Its AI models are also used by US technology companies. Snowflake, Vercel and OpenRouter all include DeepSeek in products and services they offer customers.

Many startups have started using open-source AI models such as DeepSeek.

For technology developers and AI researchers, using DeepSeek costs only a small part of what it costs to use closed AI models, such as Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's Codex.

DeepSeek has also spent far less money developing its AI models than US AI companies have spent developing their own.

Last year, DeepSeek said it cost about $6m (£4.5m) to train the first version of its model. By comparison, the cost of developing OpenAI's GPT-4 was about $100m. These figures caused technology stocks to fall sharply.

The latest version of DeepSeek was released last week. People using it have praised it online, saying it performs better than even OpenAI's most advanced AI tools on common tasks, such as writing computer code.