First US DeepSeek ban could be on the horizon

Lawmakers in the US House of Representatives want to ban DeepSeek’s AI models from federal devices.

Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Darin LaHood, a Democrat from New Jersey and a Republican from Illinois, respectively, introduced a bill on Thursday called the “No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act.” It would work similarly to the ban of TikTok on federal devices, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden in December 2022. Both bans apply to all government-owned electronics, including phones and computers.

DeepSeek’s R1 large language model is a powerful alternative to the top models from Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI — the first Chinese model to take the AI world by storm. But its privacy policy indicates that it can send user data to China Mobile, a Chinese state-owned telecom company that’s sanctioned in the US.

Since DeepSeek shot to fame in January, Australia and Taiwan have blocked access on government devices; Italy has banned it nationwide for citizens on privacy grounds. Congress may go further and try to ban DeepSeek in the United States, but so far no members have proposed doing that.