DHS orders DeepSeek removed from federal civilian IT systems

The Department of Homeland Security has ordered federal civilian agencies to strip DeepSeek technology from their IT systems and stop procuring it, and the order reaches third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations. Agencies had 60 days from issuance to request exceptions. The notice, 91 FR 66346, hit the Federal Register on October 20.

Key facts

• The order covers "all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations," per the Federal Register notice (91 FR 66346, docket DHS-2026-0628).
• DHS Secretary issued the order on July 24, 2026; it was filed for public inspection October 19 and published October 20 (CNBC).
• Scope is federal civilian agencies, including Treasury, State, and Justice; the Department of Defense is excluded (CNBC).
• Legal basis: the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018, 41 U.S.C. 1321-1328, following a Federal Acquisition Security Council recommendation (Federal Register).
• Excluded entities are defined by affiliation under 48 CFR 2.101, capturing Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd and affiliated entities (Federal Register, Quartz).

What happened

The notice runs five pages and does two things. First, it excludes information technology products and services developed by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd, including affiliated entities as defined in 48 CFR 2.101, from federal civilian procurements. Second, it directs removal of all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations, from civilian agency IT. The signed order is appended to the notice as page images and lives on Regulations.gov under docket DHS-2026-0628.

The mechanism is the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018, which lets the Secretary of Homeland Security issue exclusion and removal orders after a Federal Acquisition Security Council recommendation. The implementation contact is the FASCSA Order Implementation Team in CISA's Cybersecurity Division.

The timing drew attention. The order was signed July 24 but only became public on October 19-20, when it appeared on public inspection at 8:45 am and then in the daily Federal Register. The 60-day window for agencies to request exceptions in writing runs from issuance, which means it closed around September 22, while the order itself was still unpublished (CNBC).

DHS's stated reasoning, quoted by CNBC, is that DeepSeek's models "present multiple threat vectors": potential access to sensitive US government data by Chinese authorities, possible transfer of that data to China, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities, citing open-source research that identified multiple critical vulnerabilities in DeepSeek's iOS app. China's foreign ministry told Reuters it "consistently opposes the over-generalization of national security" (via CNBC). DeepSeek did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

Why it matters

The clause that matters most to builders is the third-party one. This is not a device ban or a ban on the official app. It covers "third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations," which on its face sweeps in US-hosted tooling whose AI layer runs on DeepSeek models, whoever operates it. A federal civilian customer reading this order literally cannot buy those services.

What the notice does not define is how far "developed using DeepSeek implementations" extends: fine-tuned derivatives of the open weights, hosted quantized copies, or anything mentioning DeepSeek in a model card. The summary text leaves that boundary open, and the signed order appendix is images rather than machine-readable text. Vendors in the open-model API economy who touch government-adjacent customers now have a compliance question they cannot fully answer from the notice alone. We flagged this gap in our coverage of DeepSeek's official API versus third-party resellers, and it just became a procurement question instead of a pricing one.

The scope limits are just as important. This is a civilian-agency order; the Department of Defense is excluded from it, and it says nothing about state governments, US allies, or private companies. Vendors outside the federal supply chain see no direct change.

Background

This is the fourth and broadest federal restriction on DeepSeek in under two years. Congress restricted DeepSeek's use in intelligence community systems in December 2025 through the intelligence authorization act. Commerce Department bureaus banned DeepSeek on government devices in March 2025, and the Defense Information Systems Agency blocked access in January 2025, according to reporting compiled by CNBC. What separates this order from those device-level and agency-level restrictions is the procurement exclusion plus the third-party removal clause, which operate on the supply chain rather than on endpoints.

For context on the policy debate, DeAI has covered the data-handling practices behind DeepSeek's hosted service in does DeepSeek store your data, the blurred line between official and third-party DeepSeek endpoints in the silent swap of DeepSeek V4 Flash serving, and how open-weight releases travel through resellers in self-hosting versus API cost. None of that coverage changes the legal analysis here: a government procurement order binds buyers, not model weights.

The order also lands in the same week DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer, the Apache-2.0 serving framework behind its production traffic, which we cover separately in today's PULSE. Open weights and open serving stacks are inspectable and copyable; federal procurement exclusions do not touch that layer. The two facts sit oddly together, and both matter to anyone deciding where to run these models.

What's next

Three things to watch. First, whether agencies disclose exception requests or compliance timelines now that the order is public; the written-justification window has technically closed, so any exceptions would have been filed blind. Second, whether the third-party clause gets operational guidance, since "developed using DeepSeek implementations" is the phrase every reseller and marketplace with government-adjacent customers needs defined. Third, Beijing's response: China's foreign ministry has already framed the order as politicized, and retaliation against US cloud or model vendors operating in China is the obvious escalation to watch for.