The key facts
- DHS banned DeepSeek in civilian agencies — Treasury, State Department, Justice Department; Defense Department excluded
- The ban took effect in late July and was made public on Monday
- DeepSeek remains popular: its models are used by Snowflake, Vercel, and OpenRouter
Ban for Civilian Agencies
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has ordered the removal of all AI technology from the Chinese company DeepSeek from most government systems. The ban covers the use of DeepSeek in civilian agencies, including the Treasury Department, the State Department, and the Department of Justice, as well as any technology created with the help of its AI models. Departments of the Defense Department are excluded from the ban. The order was announced on Monday, but it has been in effect since late July. DHS did not disclose specific security considerations; the publication sent inquiries to DHS, DeepSeek, and the Chinese embassy in Washington.
Context of the Confrontation with China
The decision followed criticism of Chinese AI from the Trump administration and American companies. White House technology chief Michael Kratsios wrote earlier this year in an internal memo that there had been 'malicious exploitation' of American AI companies, mainly by Chinese competitors. Anthropic and OpenAI, preparing to go public in the coming months, claimed that their models had been effectively copied by a number of Chinese AI firms, including DeepSeek. President Donald Trump has called China the key US rival in AI development.
DeepSeek's Popularity and Cost-Effectiveness
DeepSeek has been gaining popularity since its first public release in 2025 — demand was so high that the company's servers sometimes went down. Its free app is among the most downloaded in the App Store, and its models are used by American companies Snowflake, Vercel, and OpenRouter. Startups are attracted by the open-source code and low cost: using DeepSeek costs a small fraction of the price of closed models like Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, or OpenAI's Codex. According to DeepSeek itself, training the debut version of the model cost about $6 million (£4.5 million), whereas the costs of OpenAI's GPT-4 were estimated at roughly $100 million; this information crashed tech stocks at the time. The newest version of DeepSeek was released last week, and users praise it online, claiming it outperforms even the most advanced OpenAI tools in typical tasks like writing code.
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