By asahifile 
The US Department of Homeland Security has ordered every federal civilian agency to strip DeepSeek products out of its information technology, and to stop buying them. The notice, set for publication in the Federal Register on 20 October under docket DHS-2026-0628, rests on the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 (FASCSA) and a recommendation from the Federal Acquisition Security Council.
The scope is broader than a procurement blacklist. The order excludes information technology products and services “developed by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd” — and by affiliated entities — from civilian agency procurements, and separately requires the removal of “all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations” from civilian agency IT. Existing installations go; future purchases go; anything with DeepSeek lineage underneath goes.
What the order actually covers
Two mechanisms are running at once. The first is a purchasing ban: civilian agencies may not buy DeepSeek products or services. The second is a removal requirement, which is harder, because it reaches third-party products built on DeepSeek’s models or “underlying implementations”. A vendor whose helpdesk assistant quietly routes prompts through a DeepSeek checkpoint now has to prove its AI stack has no DeepSeek lineage, or explain why it should stay.
Agencies can request exceptions, but they must file 60 days in advance and offer a “compelling justification”, such as an inability to perform a mission-critical function. The accompanying letter from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is dated 26 June, which indicates the exclusion has been in force for months and the Federal Register notice is the public record of it.
The stated threat case
Mullin’s letter describes DeepSeek’s models as presenting “multiple threat vectors” to civilian federal systems. It notes that the models store data on servers based in China, where national security law gives the government wide latitude to compel data from domestic companies; that DeepSeek-hosted models collect personally identifiable information and trace users’ “digital fingerprints” online; and that the ordinary prompt-and-response loop “may result in the transfer of sensitive data” to Chinese authorities. Combined with public data, the letter warns, that could “produce actionable intelligence on U.S. persons and/or government programs”.
Some of those arguments are specific to a Chinese vendor, and some — mass collection, prompt retention, model-level vulnerabilities — would apply to AI models from anywhere. That is the awkward part of the order: the mechanism it uses is provenance-based, but the risks it names are partly generic.
Why open weights make removal harder than procurement
DeepSeek’s models are open-weight, which changes the shape of the problem. A closed API can be switched off with a contract and a firewall rule. Open weights, once downloaded, live on laptops, test servers and CI runners. During the transition, DHS encourages agencies to monitor traffic in and out, add logging and data-exfiltration controls, and flag anomalous activity — the language of incident response, not procurement.
DeepSeek is the only Chinese model named. It is not the only one on the watchlist: Moonshot AI, the maker of Kimi, and Alibaba, which publishes Qwen, have both drawn US official attention, and DeepSeek itself was accused by US frontier labs and the federal government of “systematically” distilling American models earlier this year. The FASCSA route lets Washington act vendor by vendor without a new law, which suggests the list can grow.
What to watch
- Whether any agency files a 60-day exception request, and on what grounds — the first real test of how much DeepSeek is embedded in federal workflows.
- Whether Moonshot, Alibaba or other open-weight publishers are named in a follow-up order.
- How federal contractors document model provenance. “No DeepSeek lineage” is easy to assert and hard to audit.
- Whether allied governments copy the FASCSA approach, or prefer export controls and procurement guidance.
- DeepSeek’s own response — the company has previously framed restrictions as protectionism rather than security policy.
Sources: Federal Register notice, DHS-2026-0628; CyberScoop; The Wall Street Journal; South China Morning Post; BBC News.