alt Hacker NewsDeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order
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Australia leading the way - our fully informed and highly tech literate (avg age of House of Reps ~=52yo) government banned Deepseek in February last year, including downloadable GGUF's - with some nebulously hand-wavy 'it's just too dangerous' safety claims:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-04/deepseek-banned-from-...
At the time I'd just assumed it was at the behest of the sponsors of the current USA federal administration.
When it says civilian agencies are ordered to purge all "third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations", what does that actually mean? Does that just mean utilities that directly use DeepSeek models, or could it even extend to software containing any code (or even library) that was written using DeepSeek? Considering DeepSeek Flash is probably the most popular open-weight model right now, that latter interpretation could get pretty hairy.
I don’t know why this isn’t the majority opinion here in this western audience, but this seems like common sense to me. Why would you let the gov use foreign technology, particularly when standing in for human thought, when you have your own technology to choose from? No one is surprised we’re not buying military planes from China.
Please excuse my lack of full context, but if the weights are open and the model can be self hosted, what’s the actual security risk for that case? Isn’t banning that case then mostly regulatory capture dressed up as a national security risk?
Really just a few small steps from becoming the default approved model for US federal agencies though.
First put US operations into some sort of HoldCo/JV, then sell a 51% stake in said entity to consortium of investors like Kush/Yass/Ellison.. profit.
I don't understand why this is such a shocker to some of you. China is not and has never been a good guy. Neither is the US. It is the US best interest to hold certain strategic technology as secret and prevent any other nation from having access to it. Whether this is by banning export of EUV machines or by restricting access to Chinese AI, both are normal political moves.
The issue with dealing with a country whose culture is more transparent (US) than closed doors hush secrecy (China) is that stuff like this comes out and people have opinions about it. China on the other hand keeps quiet about this stuff and instead spreads propaganda about how great their country is.
The models may well contain malware or security vulnerabilities. But they are at least open to inspection because the weights are available, the same can not be said about US providers of inference such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Why specifically DeepSeek, when there's a whole cohort of Chinese open weights models? GLM, Qwen, Kimi, Minimax, etc.
> The order's summary of risks says DeepSeek's servers are in China and that Chinese law "permits extensive authority to government cyber and intelligence functions to access private company infrastructure".
So the Chinese version of the American CLOUD Act?
Here's the transcription of the reasoning:
> Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd. (hereinafter DeepSeek), a foreign, privately-owned company, located in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides multiple artificial intelligence applications available widely and free of charge. DeepSeek’s models present multiple threat vectors. DeepSeek servers are located in the PRC, and the PRC legal system permits extensive authority to government cyber and intelligence functions to access private company infrastructure. For DeepSeek-hosted instances of their models, DeepSeek’s account generation process collects personally identifiable information (PII) and may also track and digitally fingerprint users. DeepSeek’s most widely used applications function through a prompt-and-response process that requires presenting information to the model, and which may result in the transfer of sensitive data to the PRC if used by U.S. government employees or vendors. The transfer of the aforementioned information to the PRC, either independently or in combination with publicly available data, could produce actionable intelligence on U.S. persons and/or government programs. The models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities. Indeed, open-source security research has found that the DeepSeek iOS mobile application contains multiple critical vulnerabilities.Let me guess, 80% of people here can't reason why the government would do this, completely forgetting the report Anthropic published about all the data they obtained by foreign actors getting routed to Anthropic inference.
This is good. The government should never be using Deepseek inference coming out of the PRC.
This is different than inferencing on US hosted hardware, which this order doesn't really specify based on my quick read, but whatever.
And so it begins. Regulatory Capture Stage Complete!
From the summary, this affects contractors and providers of IT services and products to US Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies. It has nothing to do with any other part of the federal government (e.g. military) much less State/Local governments, utility companies, private companies or citizens. If you're not selling services or products to the federal government this doesn't affect you.
Once the open weight models are banned in the US, there will be no incentives for major labs and corporations to release open weight models.
Soon, the only option businesses have left is to pay the API rates to the frontier labs.
We might start to see API rates drop, however, due to price wars.
Forget all the benchmarks, this is how you know a model is actually good.
Free market for me, not for you!
Huawei, BYD, TikTok, DeepSeek, Binance, etc
If something threatens american dominance it will be declared a risk to national security, demonized in the media, and banned by executive order
Land of the pussy that can't compete openly
probably why NVIDIA is planning on buying American open model provider for a zillion dollars.
As expected. This will force all companies downstream to also adhere to the order irrespective of whether the company is situated within US or not. Protectionism at its finest.
There can’t possibly be many production uses of deepseek in the federal government to begin with, right?
This appears to ban deepseek first party usage, not the model itself. It specifically mentions the iOS app as well.
Really interesting to notice a steadily increasing proliferation of anti-open weights and anti-non-US model rhetoric in the HN comments. Yesterday I saw a comment on another thread claiming a FOSS agentic SWE provider "shill cheap and shitty models", the kind of thing I'd expect from an Anthropic/OpenAI astroturfing campaign or a person with some kind of crippling substance abuse issues doing severe and ongoing brain damage - not really clear which it is but I can't readily imagine a more reasonable third alternative.
It comes down to which backdoored models you trust.
I wonder whether the guy who wrote the order understood how LLM works and how an open source model running in an US data center could pose a "threat"?
Means Open router and similar services, are banned now?
Deepseek V4.1 Flash 1017 is out of this world good ... and cheap ... that's why.
The system acknowledges even the slightest bit that the current course attacks the systems currency which is reward for loyalty aka shareholdertrust of the gentry. At the same time its pushing forth is a admittance that it has no control over the process happening, but finds expected outcome without so catastrophic that rolling that russian roulett dice is preferable. The whole mountainside of western civilization is in motion, but the rules still apply in this cabin, so "get the snow from your ski-boots at the door" kind of law.
Does anyone know if this is based on the NIST report on the "Evaluation of DeepSeek AI Models" [1]?
> DeepSeek models advance Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narratives much more frequently than U.S. models.
[1] https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2025/09/30/CAISI...
What is the status of OpenRouter and other similar services? Are they also banned?
Thanks, Dario
This was released July 24th 2026 and agencies would have started pulling DS and products created by DS at that time. (It's in the appendix)
Great advertisement for deepseek and a clear signal open models are winning.
Why only DeepSeek?
I find it funny how many of the comments are open weights != open source.
As compared to what? Fully closed U.S. models?
The timing of this is unsurprising, with Anthropic’s Q3 revenues flattening out and the IPO in jeopardy. I expect more efforts to prop up the money-furnace labs in the coming days.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49025990
As forecasted
This is actually good news for the Europeans and the Chinese. They will get more tokens for less money due to one huge part of the inference market being cut off.
When you can’t compete on price you ask your pedo Uncle Sam to help your businesses …
Deepseek models are awesome. I use them all the time and they keep getting better.
So AI CAN be regulated in the end
It is logical for governments to ban it.
We don't know what we don't know. It would be crazy not to ban it, unless it gave truly better performance. It doesn't.
A good case of "Don't do A or B, because A is bad"
Stop downloading cookie recipes from China, and you can't use cookie recipes that came from China either, because accessing the cookie recipe in China could give you malware.
It doesn't make much sense but this is the government that gave us such greats as "the internet isa series of tubes".
This is the American way. More often after WW2. The country routinely goes to wars to impose and enforce its businesses. They have been known to do this in the name of democracy, the culture, and quite often in the name of freedom. This time it's safety; and no, it's not a war, not yet anyway – that's why this ban is nothing in comparison. Had it not been China, I'd not put any of those off the table for the land of the free.
I was planning to switch from Gemini to Deepseek and this news confirms I'm on the right track. Thank you, US government!
the order(paraphrased) is 'we are imediately ordering you to, or not to, rip out deep seek, depending on how you feel about that ,and what might go wrong, and write to us about it, sometime in the next couple of months'
This has the delightful and surely unintentional side effect of all but ensuring all federal agencies who want to use LLMs have to direct their budget to one of the domestic frontier labs (OpenAI, xAI), so that’s a nice big fat pipe of taxpayer money that’ll be going to backstop those cats while they deal with the fact that they’re getting their lunch eaten by competitors who didn’t decide the way to build a sustainable future was to incur future debts to the tune of a sizable percent of the GDP of a G20 nation.