In a bipartisan move, US lawmakers are taking up legislation to ban the Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek on government devices. The proposed legislation, led by Illinois Republican Darin LaHood and New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer, both of whom serve on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, is a response to growing concerns about possible Chinese government access to US user data.
This bans DeepSeek from being on all government-issued devices but doesn't bar any private citizens' access. Still, experts are quick to link this new bill to a previous ban on TikTok, where similar legislation initially targeted use only on federal government-issued devices and recently saw a broader ban take its place nationwide.
The lawmakers, in a letter, said the decision to introduce the DeepSeek ban bill came after an analysis by Feroot Security CEO Ivan Tsarynny, who concluded that "there is no doubt" US user data is being sent to China. LaHood responded, "Under no circumstances can we allow a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) company to obtain sensitive government or personal data."
The national security threat that DeepSeek—a CCP-affiliated company—poses to the United States is alarming. DeepSeek’s generative AI program acquires the data of U.S. users and stores the information for unidentified use by the CCP.
The US is not the only country taking action against DeepSeek. Similar bans in the usage of the AI chatbot were taken by both Taiwan and Australia, for their respective government-issued devices. Italy has moved one step ahead to completely ban the app in the entire country.
The proposed DeepSeek ban comes as there is a wider crackdown on Chinese-owned technology platforms in the US. Already, federal and state government agencies have started to ban the use of TikTok on official devices while ByteDance has been given less than 60 days to sell the app before being banned in the US through a law passed with bipartisan support last year, extended by President Trump in January.
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