Department of Homeland Security bans DeepSeek on US federal government equipment

IN 30 SECONDS

What has happened? He Department of Homeland Security prohibits DeepSeek in federal civilian agencies and orders deletion of the model and all associated software.
Who is behind? The DHS, supported by the Department of Defense and the director of National Intelligence, who issued parallel vetoes for the military apparatus.
What impact does it have? Direct precedent for the EU and for Spanish companies that have integrated Chinese open models into their test environments.

He Department of Homeland Security (DHS) prohibits DeepSeek on the teams of the United States federal government. The order, issued this week from Washingtonforces civilian agencies to erase any trace of the Chinese company’s models, including third-party software that connects to them. It is not a recommendation. It is a mandatory withdrawal.

What the order prohibits and how far its perimeter goes

The order affects the civil perimeter of the federal executive branch: the Department of Homeland Security (the agency that coordinates the homeland security and cybersecurity of the US Government), the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Energy and the rest of the civilian agencies. The private sector and citizens are left out, for now.

It is not enough to uninstall the application. The text requires DeepSeek to be removed from the systems frontend and backend and to eliminate any third-party programs that use it, integrate it as a function or have been developed by the company. The veto also extends to software that simply connects to the Chinese model.

The Department of Defense and the director of National Intelligence issued their own orders to expel the tool from military systems. The veto does not remain at the civil level: it also reaches the military apparatus. Washington does not ask permission.

From the Pentagon to Brussels: the three reasons that support the veto

The order lists three risks. The first is data access: instructions that a federal employee enters into DeepSeek, including classified or sensitive information, can travel to servers in China and become available to the Government of Beijing. The second is cybersecurity: the DHS warns that the models ‘may contain malware or other vulnerabilities’ and remember that the iOS application has had critical bugs since 2025. The third is availability: there are open, free and unregulated versions, easy to install on any computer.

Added to that is the history. Users documented in 2025 how the model censored responses about Mao Zedong that disappeared in real time. In September 2026, DeepSeek was caught routing queries through Claude, from Anthropicin a large-scale distillation operation: using the responses of a superior model to train a cheaper one. In Christian: copy homework.

Washington has not banned DeepSeek because it is Chinese. It has banned it because it is free, runs locally and cannot be audited.

The perimeter matters. The veto does not reach American companies or citizens: Anyone can continue downloading DeepSeek on their mobile. The restriction is on public purchases and federal infrastructure, not the market.

In Brussels and in Madrid reading is another. DeepSeek’s open models circulate in test environments of Spanish companies seduced by the zero cost of the software, and by administrations looking for alternatives to cloud licenses. The GDPR already requires guarantees for transfers to third countries; What changes with the DHS order is the criteria: An AI model can be vetoed based on its origin and architecture, not just its contract.

Washington Logic

Washington does not legislate against a product. Solve a problem: open weight (the models whose weights are published and anyone can run on their own server) has broken the border between foreign software and national hardware. DeepSeek gives away what OpenAI, Anthropic and Google They charge by subscription, and package it with the promise that the data does not leave the customer’s computer. For the White House donald trumpthat combination is an entry into federal systems with no contract, no audit, and no identifiable supplier in the US.

The Spanish calculation is one of cost and sovereignty. Companies with subsidiaries in the US —Telephone, Santander, BBVA, Iberdrola, Inditex— operate under federal rules on American soil and will have to audit what open models run in their corporate environments. SMEs, who have seen DeepSeek as a zero-price alternative, do not receive any orders, but they do receive a signal: The free model is not a discount, it is the business model of a third party that responds to state interests.

There is a closer American precedent, and it is not Chinese: it is Russian. In 2017, the General Services Administration expelled antivirus from Kaspersky of federal teams due to their proximity to the Kremlin; Congress later endorsed it and the veto was passed on to several allies. The same thing happens with AI, only the object is no longer an antivirus: it is a cognitive infrastructure.

The unknown is the scope. The order covers civilian agencies; The private sector is left out and in the European Union the debate remains open between the AI Regulation and case-by-case surveillance. What we observe is that Washington is erecting a trust perimeter for artificial intelligencethe same one that already applied to telecommunications with Huawei. The next test will be business software: if the criterion is extended to federal government suppliers, more than one Spanish technology company with contracts in the US will have to certify the origin of each model it runs.

Case File

The case: DHS bans DeepSeek from federal civilian agencies and orders model and any linked software removed; Defense and National Intelligence apply parallel vetoes in the military apparatus.
Key data: mandatory withdrawal in systems frontend and backendbanning of third-party software connected to DeepSeek, critical flaws in the iOS app since 2025, and a Claude distillation plot detected in September 2026.
For Spain: direct precedent for Brussels; Spanish companies with subsidiaries in the US will have to audit open models and SMEs lose the alibi of zero cost.