The United States government is taking steps to prohibit the Chinese-developed AI chatbot application DeepSeek from all government-owned devices, citing national security concerns. A bipartisan bill introduced in the US House of Representatives on February 6 follows similar actions taken against TikTok in previous years, reflecting broader tensions between Washington and Beijing over data security and technological dominance.

DeepSeek, developed by the Hangzhou-based startup DeepSeek Inc., has rapidly emerged as the most downloaded app in the US, surpassing OpenAI’s ChatGPT on Apple’s App Store. Its popularity has been fueled by its freely accessible DeepSeek-R1 model, offering AI-powered assistance without a subscription fee-unlike its American rivals. The application’s advanced AI models, including DeepSeek-V3 and R1, are now seen as formidable competitors to OpenAI’s GPT-4o and o1 reasoning models.

However, its meteoric rise has been accompanied by heightened scrutiny. Reports from cybersecurity experts suggest that DeepSeek’s code may contain hidden functionalities capable of transmitting user data to China Mobile, a state-owned telecommunications giant barred from operating in the US. These findings have raised alarms in Washington, with lawmakers and security analysts warning that the application could serve as a backdoor for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to access sensitive information.

The proposed legislation, put forth by lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, seeks to ban DeepSeek from all federal government devices, echoing the 2022 restrictions placed on TikTok. Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer underscored the urgency of the matter, stating, “This should be a no-brainer in terms of actions we should take immediately to prevent our enemy from getting information from our........

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