DHS orders DeepSeek products, and third-party tools built on them, out of federal civilian IT

The US Department of Homeland Security has ordered DeepSeek products removed from federal civilian agency IT and barred from civilian agency purchases. The notice of order was filed for public inspection on 19 October 2026 and is published in the Federal Register on 20 October.

What the order does

According to the notice, the Secretary of Homeland Security has ordered two things:

1. Exclusion: information technology products and services developed by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd, including affiliated entities, are excluded from federal civilian agency procurements.
2. Removal: “all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations,” are to be removed from civilian agency information technology.

The legal basis is the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 (41 U.S.C. 1321-1328) and its rules at 41 CFR 201-1. The notice says the order followed a review of a Federal Acquisition Security Council recommendation and “affiliated evidence”. It is signed for publication by DHS General Counsel James H. Percival II, and CISA’s FASCSA Order Implementation Team is the contact. The signed order itself sits in docket DHS-2026-0628 on regulations.gov.

What it does not do

This covers federal civilian executive-branch systems and procurements. It is not a ban on the public using DeepSeek, and the notice speaks only of civilian agencies. Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg also covered the order, and Quartz has a summary. DHS’s detailed reasoning sits in the signed order, which is not in the notice text, so we do not quote it here.

Why vendors should care

The third clause is the operational one. “Third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations” reaches past DeepSeek’s own app and API to any product that embeds or is built on DeepSeek models. Open-weight DeepSeek models are easy to drop into a product without it showing up on a feature list. Contractors selling AI features into civilian agencies should expect to be asked which models are underneath, and should have an answer ready.