The U.S. Department of Homeland Security requires civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek and its derivative products

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, pursuant to the 2018 Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act, requires U.S. civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek and DeepSeek-related products, as well as third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek, from information technology systems. DHS states that DeepSeek's hosted models store data on servers in China, with every prompt and response passing through that service, and that the data may be combined with public information to form actionable intelligence targeting U.S. personnel and government programs; for model weights running on U.S. servers, the ban relies on warnings that the models may contain malware or other vulnerabilities. Exceptions require an application submitted 60 days in advance with sufficient justification, and systems in national security systems and secure isolated information systems are outside the scope of the order; the only Chinese model named in the order is DeepSeek, while Kimi and Qwen face similar distillation allegations.