New York State Bans DeepSeek From Government Devices

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul at a press conference in New York City on Nov. 14. Kent J. Edwards/Reuters

Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek is banned from New York State’s government devices and networks, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Monday.

The ban was issued following “serious concerns” regarding the app’s “connection to foreign government surveillance and censorship, including how DeepSeek can be used to harvest user data and steal technology secrets,” Hochul’s office said in a statement.

“Public safety is my top priority and we’re working aggressively to protect New Yorkers from foreign and domestic threats,” Hochul said. “New York will continue fighting to combat cyber threats, ensure the privacy and safety of our data, and safeguard against state-sponsored censorship.”

DeepSeek, an AI startup based in Zhejiang, a province in southern China, unsettled AI investors last month after it released DeepSeek-R1 in January and said that the chatbot had achieved the same level of performance as OpenAI’s ChatGPT-o1 with only a fraction of the cost.

However, DeepSeek’s extensive data collection and censorship aligning with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideologies have raised significant concerns, leading to a series of bans of the app from government devices in Texas, Taiwan, Australia, South Korea, Canada, and the Netherlands.

U.S. House staffers and Navy service members have been warned against using the app.

House lawmakers on Feb. 7 introduced legislation aimed at a federal ban of DeepSeek in executive agencies.

Italy went further than banning the app from government devices. The country’s data regulator launched an investigation into the chatbot service on Jan. 30. The app remains unavailable in Google Play and Apple’s App Store in Italy.

Under Chinese intelligence law, all individuals and organizations have to turn data over to the state if requested for national security reasons.

The law has been the source of concern in the United States and other countries over data held by services with Chinese links, including video-sharing platform TikTok.

On Sunday, South Korea’s intelligence agency said DeepSeek is “excessively” collecting personal data and using all input data to train itself.

“Unlike other generative AI services, it has been confirmed that chat records are transferable as it includes a function to collect keyboard input patterns that can identify individuals and communicate with Chinese companies’ servers,” Seoul’s National Intelligence Service said in a statement.

According to the agency, DeepSeek gives advertisers unlimited access to user data and stores South Korean users’ data on Chinese servers.

Canadian cybersecurity firm Feroot Security said researchers found code on DeepSeek’s login page that can send user data to China Mobile, a top state-owned Chinese telecom company that is barred from operating in the United States.

Meanwhile, analyses by The Epoch Times showed that the app is censoring responses to questions about protests and human rights abuses in China, and pushing CCP’s narratives on issues such as Taiwan.

DeepSeek didn’t immediately respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

Reacting in Beijing on Feb. 6 to the South Korean government’s ban on DeekSeek in some government departments, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said Beijing “attaches great importance to data privacy and security and protects it in accordance with the law,” and “never asked and will never ask any company or individual to collect or store data against laws.”

Also on Monday, Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, told Bloomberg TV that he believes DeekSeek’s claims, including that on the cost of the AI model, are “exaggerated and a little bit misleading.”

DeekSeek appears to have reported “just their final training run, which is only a fraction of the cost it normally takes to explore, and train, and do all the tests beforehand,” Hassabis said. The AI chief also said he didn’t see any new technology in the Chinese model.