Australia bans DeepSeek on government devices

Australia joins a growing list of countries imposing bans on DeepSeek, a Chinese chatbot that has taken the world by storm.

The Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs issued a mandatory direction for all government entities to “prevent the use or installation of DeepSeek products, applications and web services.”

Where found, they should also “remove all existing instances of DeepSeek products, applications and web services from all Australian Government systems and devices," the government’s statement said.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said DeepSeek posed an “unacceptable risk” to government technology and the ban was “to protect Australia’s national security and national interest.”

The ban will not apply to private citizens’ devices. Cybernews has reached out to DeepSeek for comment.

Tech stocks worldwide plunged after the launch of DeepSeek last month. The company claimed it trained the model at a fraction of the cost of rival AI models and did so using less sophisticated chips, raising questions over the West's huge investments in chipmakers and data centres.

Recurring fairs

Australia's decision to ban DeepSeek follows similar action in Italy, while Taiwan also banned government departments from using the app earlier this week.

Released on January 10th, DeepSeek quickly surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app on the iOS App Store in the US and many other countries, with regulators scrambling to react.

Authorities in South Korea, Ireland, and France have all started their own investigations into DeepSeek, which stores user data in servers in China. The White House said the US was also looking into possible security implications.

The bans echo restrictions imposed by some countries on TikTok, a popular short-video platform owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. Australia banned TikTok on all government devices two years ago, also citing security concerns.

Before that, a number of Western countries, including the US, also moved to ban or restrict the use of Huawei equipment in their 5G networks due to security risks.