US Department Of Commerce Bans Use Of DeepSek On Employee Devices

DeepSee (photo: Unsplash)

JAKARTA - The United States (US) Department of Commerce Bureau prohibits all employees from owning or using DeepSek's (AI) artificial intelligence model on their devices.

In an email sent to all of its employees, the ban is meant to help the government maintain the security system of the Commerce Department.

"To help maintain the security of the Commerce Department's information system, access to China-based DeepSek AI is generally prohibited in all GFEs," reads the email that Reuters has seen.

In the statement, the government prohibits employees in the Commerce Department from downloading, viewing, or accessing applications related to DeepSek on their devices, be it cellular or PC.

"Don't download, view, access any desktop apps, or websites associated with DeepSek," the email continued.

In fact, US officials and members of Congress have long expressed concern about the threats DeepSek will pose to the privacy of sensitive government data and information.

Members of Congress, Josh Gottheimer and Darian LaHood, members of the House of Representatives Standing Committee for Intelligence, in February introduced legislation to ban DeepSeeek from government officials.

Earlier this month, they sent a letter to the US governor urging them to ban the Chinese AI app on government-issued equipment.

Not long ago, cybersecurity experts from Kaspersky and Tenable Research revealed that DeepSek R1 could be used to develop malicious malware.

Nick Miles, Tenable Research Technical Staff. said that from the test results, it can be concluded that DeepSeek is capable of generating log-encrypting keyloggers and keeping them secretly on devices and producing executable ransomware capable of encrypting files.

Meanwhile, Kaspersky's Threat Research and AI Technology Research has identified a campaign of advanced malware targeting Chinese-language IT professionals through fake DeepSek AI websites.

According to their analysis, the malware disguises as Ollama, a popular open source framework like DeepSeek, for running a locally generative AI model.