The Department of Homeland Security has made public an order that removes DeepSeek from the IT systems of federal civilian agencies and bars those agencies from buying its products. The order also reaches further than DeepSeek’s own apps and models. It covers “third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations,” according to the notice published in the Federal Register on October 20.
The order itself is older than the notice. It is dated July 24 and was signed by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Bloomberg reported. DHS filed the notice on October 19, and the Federal Register published it the next day.
What the Order Covers
The Federal Register notice describes two actions by the Secretary of Homeland Security.
- Federal civilian agencies must stop procuring IT products and services developed by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd, and its affiliates.
- They must remove all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, along with third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations, from civilian agency information technology.
The Secretary issued the order under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018, known as FASCSA, after reviewing a recommendation from the Federal Acquisition Security Council. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) implements it. The notice lists CISA’s FASCSA Order Implementation Team as the contact, and the signed order says CISA will review exception requests and may give technical help to agencies that lack the capacity to comply.
The scope is federal civilian agencies. CNBC named the Treasury, State and Justice departments among them, and TechTimes puts the total at roughly 430 departments, bureaus and independent agencies. The order says it does not cover those agencies’ national security systems or their secure compartmented information systems. The Pentagon is handled separately. A Sheppard Mullin analysis on JDSupra notes that the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act requires the Defense Department to keep AI developed by DeepSeek or High-Flyer out of its systems and bars DoD contractors and subcontractors from using it in contract performance.
The order does not touch private use. Companies and individuals in the US can still use DeepSeek’s apps and open models, which The Associated Press notes are widely available in the United States and mostly free to use.
Why DHS Says It Acted
The signed order, attached to the notice as an appendix, says DeepSeek’s models “present multiple threat vectors.” It points to DeepSeek’s servers being in China and says the prompt-and-response process “may result in the transfer of sensitive data to the PRC if used by U.S. government employees or vendors.” It adds that “the models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities,” and cites open-source research that found multiple critical vulnerabilities in DeepSeek’s iOS app.
DHS uses the word “may” throughout that section. The order describes risks. It does not say DHS found malware in the models.
Until agencies finish removing covered products, the order encourages them to monitor traffic in and out of the agency, add logging and data exfiltration controls, and flag anomalous activity.
The “Developed Using” Clause
The phrase “developed using DeepSeek implementations” is what makes this order unusual for AI vendors. DeepSeek publishes open weights, so a product can be built with DeepSeek without running a DeepSeek model in production. TechTimes argues that the wording reaches products built through distillation, synthetic training data or fine-tuning, even when the finished product contains no DeepSeek weights. It also notes that no current AI software bill of materials (SBOM) standard records which models were used while a system was being built.
The order’s text does not define “developed using” in that detail. TechTimes also reported that CISA had not published specific guidance on the standard when the notice was filed. Until it does, vendors that sell to civilian agencies have to read the clause themselves.
The Exception Window Had Already Closed
The order gives executive agencies 60 days from its issuance to request an exception in writing, such as a delay in compliance or an exemption for certain actions. By TechTimes‘ count, that window closed on September 22, almost a month before the order became public.
How China Responded
China pushed back and warned of retaliation, The Associated Press reported. A Foreign Ministry spokesperson said China would protect the rights and interests of Chinese companies and objected to what she described as an overly broad use of national security. China’s Ministry of Commerce said it strongly opposed the move, argued that it ignored the consensus between Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, and said Beijing would take the measures it judged necessary to defend its interests.
Where It Fits
The order builds on earlier federal restrictions. According to CNBC, the Defense Information Systems Agency moved to block access to DeepSeek models in January 2025, Commerce Department bureaus told staff in March 2025 that DeepSeek was banned on government devices, and Congress restricted DeepSeek in intelligence community systems in December 2025.
DeepSeek, meanwhile, keeps publishing. Last week it released DeepInfer, which it describes as the inference framework that powers its large-scale production services, under the Apache 2.0 license. The first release supports DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on NVIDIA SM100 GPUs and Huawei Ascend 950 NPUs.
JamoraquAI Take
The geopolitics will get the headlines. For anyone who builds or buys AI software, the phrase to remember is “developed using DeepSeek implementations.” Open-weight models end up inside products in ways that rarely get written down, through a fine-tune, a distilled model or a batch of synthetic training data. TechTimes argues the order’s wording could reach all of those, and there is no standard record that would show it either way.
If you sell software to federal civilian agencies, or to companies that do, expect buyers to ask which models touched your product during development as well as which model runs it. I suspect many teams would struggle to answer that from their own records. A simple log of every model used for training, distillation and data generation costs little to keep now and could decide a contract later.
Keep the scope in view too. This order covers federal civilian agencies, the Pentagon works under its own NDAA rules, and private companies and individuals can keep using DeepSeek.
Sources
- Federal Register, Notice of Order Regarding Exclusion and Removal of DeepSeek Products (91 FR 66346, October 20, 2026), with the signed order in the appendix
- Bloomberg via Bloomberg Law, Michael Shepard, “US Moves to Bar China’s DeepSeek From Federal Agency Systems” (October 20, 2026 update)
- TechTimes, Terrence Hill, “DHS Filed DeepSeek Ban 28 Days After Agencies Lost Right to Request Exceptions” (October 20, 2026)
- CNBC, Jenny Lee and Kai Nicol-Schwarz, “U.S. bans DeepSeek from government agency systems amid AI rift with China” (October 20, 2026)
- The Associated Press via The Washington Post, Chan Ho-Him, “China defends DeepSeek after US ban of its AI from government systems” (October 20, 2026)
- Sheppard Mullin on JDSupra, Julien Blanquart, Jordan Mallory and Reid Whitten, analysis of export control risks in choosing US or Chinese AI models (July 24, 2026)
- DeepSeek, DeepInfer repository on GitHub
