Lawmakers plan to introduce a bill Thursday that would ban DeepSeek’s chatbot application from government-owned devices, over new security concerns that the app could provide user information to the Chinese government.

The legislation written by Reps. Darin LaHood, an Illinois Republican, and Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, is echoing a strategy that Congress used 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 immediately to prevent our enemy from getting information from our government,” Gottheimer said.

DeepSeek, a disruptive new Chinese AI company, emerged seemingly out of nowhere last month. The chatbot for the Chinese startup is now the most downloaded app in the U.S. DeepSeek also gave its models away, as open-source code, which helped make it immediately popular among consumers, businesses and developers.

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 from operating in the U.S., according to an analysis by Ivan Tsarynny, CEO of Feroot Security, which specializes in data protection and cybersecurity. Tsarynny’s analysis was published earlier by the Associated Press. Source: msn

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