Instapundit’s Stephen Green says that the CCP-supported Chinese app DeepSeek “looks like a great way for Beijing to engage in espionage and IP theft with the victims doing all the work.”
This is, I think, an expression of approval of the not quite new but newly reported federal ban on the use of DeepSeek, an AI chatbot, within federal agencies (CNBC, October 20, 2026).
The Department of Homeland Security on Monday made public the order requiring federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek-related technology from their IT systems and barring them from procuring DeepSeek products and services. The ban applies to federal civilian agency IT systems, including third-party products and services developed using the company’s technology….
The order, originally issued on July 24, applies to federal civilian agencies, including the Treasury, State and Justice departments, but it excludes the Department of Defense.
Since DeepSeek burst onto the scene at the start of 2025, several U.S. government agencies have imposed various restrictions.
Congress restricted the use of DeepSeek in intelligence community systems in December 2025. Earlier that year in March, U.S. Commerce Department bureaus told staff DeepSeek was banned on government devices, Reuters reported at the time. The Defense Information Systems Agency moved to block access to DeepSeek models in January 2025, according to reports from Bloomberg.
DeepSeek’s AI models “present multiple threat vectors,” the latest DHS order states, citing concerns over potential access to sensitive data by Chinese authorities and potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman objects to the DHS ban, saying, “China consistently opposes the overgeneralization of,” etc.
The exclusion of the Department of Defense from the DHS ban does not mean that any part of DOD is using DeepSeek to transmit military secrets to China. A congressional report notes that “Section 1532 [of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act] prohibits DOD from using or acquiring covered AI systems—including those from DeepSeek and High Flyer—or systems from covered nations—including the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation, and the Islamic Republic of Iran—or AI companies. The SECDEF may grant a case-by-case waiver for research, training, and evaluation or military activities supporting national security functions such as counterterrorism or counterintelligence.”
Other apps
The DHS ban is justified. Why didn’t it come sooner than July 2026? We’ve known for a while that DeepSeek is a deeply censored Chinese spy app. (By “Chinese spy app” I mean “app that collects data on users and sends it to servers in China.”) And what about other Chinese spy apps still permitted within federal agencies?
Wider bans imposed during the first Trump administration on several such apps, including TikTok and WeChat, were challenged in court and then rescinded by a Biden executive order. But if wider bans are not at present politically feasible, at least the federal government can prohibit all federal agencies from using all information-collecting and censorship-imposing Chinese apps.
Among these we must count the U.S. version of TikTok, which is still entwined with Beijing-based ByteDance and which has policies that are too opaque to even be known let alone trusted. But the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has determined that the TikTok US app “does not fall within” the prohibition of TikTok “from federal government technology” because “the Joint Venture functions independently of ByteDance, is majority-owned by American investors, and has revised the content-recommendation algorithm and cybersecurity program originally developed by ByteDance to insulate federal government information against the concerning security features that initially motivated the prohibition.” This would be very reassuring if we could be sure that it were all true.
Meanwhile, the FBI has issued an alert urging everyone to be careful when using Chinese and other spy apps.
Also see:
FBI: “Data Security Risks of Using Foreign-Developed Mobile Apps in the United States” (March 31, 2026)
“As of early 2026, many of the most downloaded and top-grossing apps in the United States are developed and maintained by foreign companies, particularly those based in China. The apps that maintain digital infrastructure in China are subject to China’s extensive national security laws, enabling the Chinese government to potentially access mobile app users’ data.”
