Hochul issues statewide ban of Chinese AI DeepSeek on government networks, devices

Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a statewide ban of the Chinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek on all government networks and devices Monday — fearing “foreign government surveillance.”

The decision comes after Wall Street and Silicon Valley got clobbered over rising fears about DeepSeek – a Chinese artificial intelligence startup owned by High-Flyer, a China-based firm based that claims to have developed an advanced model at a fraction of the cost of its US counterparts.

“Public safety is my top priority and we’re working aggressively to protect New Yorkers from foreign and domestic threats,” Hochul said in the statement. 

“New York will continue fighting to combat cyber threats, ensure the privacy and safety of our data, and safeguard against state-sponsored censorship.”

The ban will prevent the chatbot app from being downloaded by all government devices and networks due to “serious concerns” about DeepSeek AI’s “connection to foreign government surveillance and censorship, including how DeepSeek can be used to harvest user data and steal technology secrets,” the statement added.

A bipartisan coalition in the US House was already moving to ban the app from federal devices — similar to the 2023 prohibition of Chinese-run app TikTok on federal devices.

Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) introduced the “No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act” on Thursday.

The lawmakers referenced intel that the Chinese app has intentionally hidden code that could send user login information to China Mobile, a state-owned telecommunications company that has been banned in the US.

Major US tech stocks — including Nvidia, Microsoft and Tesla — suffered a $1 trillion rout on Jan. 27 after DeepSeek announced it had built it’s AI model in a matter of months for just $6 million.

The announcement upended industry forecasts from tech giants such as Sam Altman’s OpenAI GPT-4 computer chip that would take $100 million to train, and rival company Anthropic’s model which would cost a whopping $1 billion in training.

DeepSeek immediately surged to the top of the charts in Apple’s App Store – displacing OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other competitors. 

The company released details in January about their R1 reasoning model that underpins its chatbot. The AI firm turned heads in Silicon Valley with a research paper explaining how it built the model, and claiming that it excels at problem-solving despite being cheaper to train and run than its rivals.

The news sent the US tech and AI industry into a panic.

In October, Hochul announced the launch of New York’s Empire AI consortium, a collection of public and private research institutions to advance AI research.

with Post wires