Two US Congress members plan to introduce bipartisan legislation to ban China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot from government devices. The bill’s announcement came after a security expert said DeepSeek not only poses a threat to US AI stocks; it’s also a national security risk. The chatbot has recently been the most downloaded app in the US.
U.S. Representatives Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Darin LaHood (R-IL), each party’s senior-most member on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, plan to introduce the “No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act.” If all of this sounds familiar, the move echoes Congress’ blocking of TikTok from government devices in 2022. That was the opening salvo in a saga that culminated in the US-wide ban the app is now staring down.
The alarm follows an independent analysis from Feroot Security claiming that DeepSeek’s code sends user data directly to the Chinese government-owned China Mobile. “We see direct links to servers and companies in China that are under control of the Chinese government,” Feroot analyst Ivan Tsarynny said in an interview with ABC News. “This is something we’ve never seen before.”
“Our personal information is being sent to China, there is no denial, and the DeepSeek tool is collecting everything that American users connect to it,” Tsarynny told the Wall Street Journal. ABC reported on Wednesday that multiple cybersecurity experts verified Feroot’s findings.
The US Navy and NASA have already banned DeepSeek from their employees’ devices. Texas is the only state to have blocked the app from government devices. Three other countries have already beat the US to the punch in banning the app: Italy, South Korea and Australia.
LaHood warned of the app’s dangers. “The national security threat that DeepSeek — a CCP-affiliated company — poses to the United States is alarming,” the Representative wrote in a press release. “DeepSeek’s generative AI program acquires the data of US users and stores the information for unidentified use by the CCP. Under no circumstances can we allow a CCP company to obtain sensitive government or personal data.”
“We must get to the bottom of DeepSeek’s malign activities,” Gottheimer wrote. “We simply can’t risk the CCP infiltrating the devices of our government officials and jeopardizing our national security.”