The Department of Homeland Security published an order on October 20 that excludes products and services developed by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and its affiliates from federal civilian procurement, per the Federal Register notice. Agencies must also remove DeepSeek products from their systems.
The order covers more than DeepSeek's own app. The notice applies removal to "third-party products and services built using DeepSeek implementations," which matters because DeepSeek publishes its model weights and other companies build on them. It is issued under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 after a recommendation from the Federal Acquisition Security Council. It does not apply to private companies, state governments or individual users. Reports describe national security systems as outside it, since those fall to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. The signed order itself sits in the appendix in docket DHS-2026-0628.
Contractors are where it bites. Federal contracts carry FAR clause 52.204-30, which bars using a covered product in contract performance without a waiver. A contractor that finds one, including through a subcontractor at any tier, has 3 business days to report it to the contracting officer and 10 more to describe what it did about it.
This is the first time the 2018 law has been used against an AI company, per OfficeChai. Earlier bills to ban DeepSeek on government devices never passed.
Bottom Line
If you sell software to a civilian federal agency, the question is no longer whether you use the DeepSeek app. It is whether any model in your product, including a fine-tune or a distilled model, traces back to DeepSeek weights. Start that inventory now, since the clock to report starts when you find one.