US Orders DeepSeek Out of Federal Civilian Systems

The United States has now drawn a formal line around one Chinese AI company across its entire civilian government. Under an order published in the Federal Register on 20 October 2026, federal civilian agencies must remove DeepSeek products from their information technology systems and stop buying them, including third-party products built using DeepSeek implementations.

The order was issued by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on 24 July 2026, under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018. It names Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd., the developer of the R1 and V3 models, and covers its affiliates as defined in federal acquisition rules. It is the kind of order that sounds technical but has a very practical effect: it turns the question "does this product contain DeepSeek?" into a compliance question for every civilian agency.

That is a significant step. Individual agencies and states had already restricted DeepSeek, but this order creates a single, government-wide requirement for civilian agencies. It does not restrict companies or the public, and it does not cover the Department of Defense or national security systems, which fall under different authorities. Its scope is civilian federal IT, and within that scope it is broad.



Credit: DeepSeek logo, via The Foldline

What agencies must actually do

The order does two things at once. First, it excludes information technology products and services developed by DeepSeek and its affiliated entities from federal civilian agency purchases. Agencies may no longer buy them. Second, it requires agencies to remove all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations, from their own information systems.

The second part is the harder one. Removing a chatbot app is straightforward. Finding every third-party tool that quietly uses a DeepSeek model underneath is not. A vendor may sell a product under its own brand, with its own interface, while the underlying model is DeepSeek. Under this order, that product is still covered. Agencies will need to ask suppliers, directly, what model their product is built on.

The order carries an exception process: agencies can submit written requests with a compelling justification and proposed mitigations. Reporting on the order noted an awkward timing detail: the exception window, described as 60 days from issuance, had already elapsed by the time the public Federal Register filing appeared on 19 October, which means agencies seeking exceptions were already past the submission point before the notice was publicly posted. That timing issue is likely to be tested in practice, and it is one of the first things to watch as agencies try to comply.

Why Washington says DeepSeek is a risk

The Department of Homeland Security argued that DeepSeek models present multiple threat vectors for federal systems. According to the notice and reporting on it, use of the product may result in the transfer of sensitive data to China if used by US government employees or vendors, and the models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities.

Reporting also said DHS warned that prompts entered into DeepSeek applications could send sensitive data to China, and that information could be combined with public records to build actionable intelligence on US persons or government agencies. DeepSeek's own privacy policy says it collects, processes and stores users' personal data in China, which is central to the government's concern.

It is important to be precise about what the order does and does not prove. The order is a precautionary supply-chain security measure. It does not, by itself, establish that every covered product has transmitted sensitive data or contains malicious code. It reflects a risk assessment by the department, not a published forensic finding about every deployment.

How the law works

The order rests on the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018. Under that law, the Federal Acquisition Security Council recommends exclusion and removal orders, and three officials may issue them: the Secretary of Homeland Security for civilian agencies, the Secretary of Defense for the Defense Department and national security systems, and the Director of National Intelligence for the intelligence community.

The law was first used in 2025, when the Director of National Intelligence excluded Acronis, a Swiss cybersecurity and data protection company, from intelligence community procurement and ordered its products removed from intelligence community systems. The DeepSeek order is therefore not a one-off invention. It is the civilian-agency version of a tool that has already been used once, now applied to the most prominent Chinese AI company in the world.

The Federal Register document is numbered 2026-21447, under docket DHS-2026-0628, and the order itself is Exclusion and Removal Order 2026-01. Those references matter because they are how agencies, vendors and lawyers will cite the order in contracts and compliance work.



Credit: US Capitol building, via CreateWebQuest

What this means beyond the US government

For vendors, the order changes the value of provenance. It is no longer enough to say a product works well or is cheap. Buyers, especially public-sector buyers, will ask where the model came from, who trained it, and where data goes. A product that cannot answer those questions clearly becomes a compliance risk, even if it performs well.

For other governments, the order is a template. Sweden, for example, has separately moved to block ChatGPT and Claude websites on government work computers from 26 October 2026, while keeping Microsoft Copilot, showing that different governments are drawing different lines around different models for different reasons. The US order is broader in one way, because it reaches third-party products built on DeepSeek, and narrower in another, because it applies only to civilian federal agencies.

For the public, the order does not change what anyone can use on a personal device. It does not ban DeepSeek for companies or individuals. But it does signal how seriously Washington now treats the origin of an AI model as a security question, not just a performance question. That signal will shape procurement far beyond the agencies named in the order.

What to watch next

Three things will show whether the order works as intended. First, how agencies handle the third-party problem: whether they can actually inventory products built on DeepSeek implementations, or whether the requirement becomes a paperwork exercise. Second, how the exception timing issue is resolved, and whether agencies that need an exception can still get one. Third, whether other governments follow with similar orders, or whether the US remains an outlier.

The order also leaves one definition deliberately vague. The notice does not define "DeepSeek implementations" in detail. That vagueness gives agencies flexibility, but it also creates uncertainty for vendors. A product that uses a DeepSeek model for one small feature may be treated differently from a product built entirely on DeepSeek, but the order does not draw that line clearly. Expect lawyers and compliance teams to spend a great deal of time on that question.



Credit: DeepSeek branding, via Exhibit.tech

Key Takeaways

  • The US Department of Homeland Security published an order in the Federal Register on 20 October 2026 requiring federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products and stop buying them.
  • The order, signed 24 July 2026 by Secretary Markwayne Mullin, covers Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd. and its affiliates, plus third-party products built using DeepSeek implementations.
  • It rests on the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018, and is the civilian-agency version of a tool first used in 2025 against Acronis.
  • DHS cited multiple threat vectors, including possible transfer of sensitive data to China and possible malware or vulnerabilities in the models.
  • The order does not restrict companies or the public, does not cover the Department of Defense, and does not by itself prove every covered product transmitted data or contained malicious code.
  • The notice does not define "DeepSeek implementations" in detail, and the exception window timing is already a live compliance question.

The DeepSeek order is less about one company than about a new rule for government AI buying: provenance matters as much as performance. Agencies must now know, and be able to prove, where their AI comes from. That rule will outlast this order, and it will shape how AI vendors sell to governments for years.

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