Lawmakers plan to introduce a bill Thursday that would ban DeeSeek’s chatbot application from government-owned devices, over new security concerns that the app could provide user information to the Chinese government, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The legislation written by Darin LaHood, an Illinois Republican, and Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, is echoing a strategy that Congress use to ban Chinese-controlled TikTok from government devices, which marked the beginning of the effort to block the company from operating in the U.S.
“This should be a no-brainer in terms of actions we should take to immediately prevent our enemy from getting information from our government,” Gottheimer said.
The chatbot app, however, has intentionally hidden code that could send user login information to China Mobile, a state-owned telecommunications company that has been banned in the U.S., according to an analysis by Ivan Tsarynny, chief executive of Feroot Security, which specializes in data protection and cybersecurity. Tsarynny;s analysis was published earlier by the Associated Press.
“Our personal information is being sent to China, there is no denial, and the DeepSeek tool is collecting everything that American users connect to it,” Tsarynny said in an interview.
ArsTechnica reported: Lawmakers are now pushing to immediately ban the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek on government devices, citing national security concerns that the Chines Communist Party (CCP) may have built a backdoor into DeepSeek to access Americans’ sensitive private data. If passed, DeepSeek could be banned within 60 days.
DeepSeek shocked the world when it debuted last month. Rumored to rival OpenAI o1 reasoning model despite costing significantly less to develop, DeepSeek’s open source model is free to download. That propelled its popularity, making DeepSeek the most-downloaded app in the U.S.
TikTok has been banned on government devices since 2022, and Donald Trump is currently trying to work out a deal to save the app after TikTok was briefly blocked nationwide. As national security fears around TikTok swirl, one Senator, John Curtis (R-Utah) warned yesterday that DeepSeek is “TikTok on steroids” while questioning Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick for Commerce secretary.
ABC News reported: Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) is demanding swift action after ABC News’ exclusive reporting about hidden links in DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence tool that could potentially send data to a Chinese state-owned telecommunications company.
“I think we should ban DeepSeek from all government devices immediately. No one should be allowed to downloaded it onto their device,” Gottheimer, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC News.
A new bill Gottheimer proposed on Thursday is called the “No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act” and it would require the Office of Management and Budget to develop guidelines within 60 days for the removal of DeepSeek from federal technologies, with exceptions for law enforcement and national security-related activity.
In my opinion, DeepSeek could pose a danger to the lawmakers in the U.S House and Senate. Hopefully, this app will be removed from lawmaker’s phones.