Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Jan. 31 issued a ban on the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) app DeepSeek and five other Chinese-owned social media apps from government-issued devices.
State employees and contractors will not be allowed to download or use the banned apps on both state-owned and personal devices they use for work, according to the governor’s statement.
The ban includes DeepSeek and Chinese social media apps Lemon8, owned by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, and Xingyin Information’s RedNote (also known as Xiaohongshu), as well as Chinese-owned stock trading apps Moomoo, Tiger Brokers, and Webull—all of which were identified in the proclamation order as posing “a security risk” to the state of Texas.
“Texas will not allow the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate our state’s critical infrastructure through data-harvesting AI and social media apps,” the governor stated. “Texas will continue to protect and defend our state from hostile foreign actors.”
The state has already banned the use of TikTok on government-issued devices in December 2022 due to concerns that the Chinese regime could access sensitive data through the app, citing Beijing’s national intelligence law that requires all entities in China to hand over user data if the CCP authorities ask them to.
Over the past two months, Abbott has issued four directives aimed at safeguarding state agencies from the CCP influence, including ordering the arrest of criminals executing CCP influence operations and requiring state agencies to “fully divest” from China, according to his statement.
DeepSeek has sparked data privacy concerns following the launch of its free open-source AI model earlier this month. The app is controlled by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence, according to its privacy policy webpage.
The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Jan. 28 that the government is looking into the potential national security implications of the DeepSeek AI app.
Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), who chairs the House Select Committee on the CCP, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) sent a letter to National Security Advisor Mike Waltz on Jan. 29 urging to review the potential national security benefits for placing export controls on Nvidia’s H20 and other semiconductor chips that could be used for DeepSeek’s AI development.
The lawmakers stated that DeepSeek’s use of Nvidia’s H800 chip, which falls outside U.S. export controls, demonstrates the need to frequently update export controls to prevent the CCP from exploiting “regulatory gaps and loopholes.” They also called on the government to restrict Chinese-trained AI systems from being used in U.S. critical infrastructure.
A U.S. Navy spokesperson told The Epoch Times on Jan. 30 that service members had been advised not to use any open-source AI programs for official work, including the DeepSeek chatbot.
The Italian Data Protection Authority has blocked access to DeepSeek due to concerns over its handling of user data. The regulator said DeepSeek’s response to its inquiry about the app’s data collection was insufficient.
DeepSeek’s privacy policy webpage states that data collected from the app will be stored “in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.” It also states that user information may be disclosed to third parties if it believes that such disclosure is necessary “to comply with applicable law, legal process or government requests, as consistent with internationally recognized standards.”
The DeepSeek AI app quickly became the most downloaded free app on Apple’s app store in the United States last week, sending Nvidia’s share price to drop about 17 percent on Jan. 27, after the company announced that its AI models were developed at a fraction of the cost of its rivals, using NVIDIA’s less-advanced H800 chips.
Concerns have also been raised about censorship. DeepSeek shows heavy bias in favor of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and provides responses to sensitive topics, such as human rights violations, that are reminiscent of the CCP’s state-controlled media reports.
