With his new order prohibiting Texas agencies from using CCP-controlled AI or social apps on government-issued devices, Texas Governor Abbott (shown above) is expanding policies begun in 2022 (“Texas Governor Bans Chinese AI, Social Apps on Govt Devices,” GovTech, February 3, 2025).
In that year, Abbott banned the use of the TikTok app on state devices “to protect against the growing threat of the Chinese Communist Party gaining access to critical U.S. information and infrastructure.”
In 2023, the state government distributed a formal security plan to help agencies protect themselves.
In 2024, Abbott directed the Texas Department of Public Safety “to target and arrest anyone implementing CCP influence operations [that] forcibly return people to China.” He ordered all state agencies that had invested any state funds in China to divest and prohibited “any new investments of state funds in China.” He acted to protect protect Texas infrastructure from any “hostile foreign government or their proxies.” And the legislature considered banning CCP-controlled enterprises from owning land in Texas.
Quadruple threat
In a column for this site about Abbott’s initiatives, James Roth suggested that if every state in the union “were to emulate Texas’s quadruple threat to Beijing, it would send a powerful message with immediate effects: no investments, active detection and prosecution of political agents, protection of infrastructure, and restrictions on property ownership.”
About his latest enhancement of this quadruple defense, Governor Abbott says:
“Texas will not allow the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate our state’s critical infrastructure through data-harvesting AI and social media apps…. To achieve that mission, I ordered Texas state agencies to ban Chinese government-based AI and social media apps from all state-issued devices. State agencies and employees responsible for handling critical infrastructure, intellectual property, and personal information must be protected from malicious espionage operations by the Chinese Communist Party. Texas will continue to protect and defend our state from hostile foreign actors.”
Governor Abbott also ordered the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) and Department of Information Resources to add the following technologies to the state’s prohibited technologies list, which prohibits state employees and contractors from downloading and using these apps on state-owned or personal devices used for work: RedNote, DeepSeek, Webull, Tiger Brokers, Moomoo, Lemon8
What’s new here is not the focus on China-controlled apps but the number of apps specifically mentioned, including several that have been in the headlines.
Also see:
StoptheCCP.org: “Don’t Mess With Texas, Beijing”
