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Wednesday, October 21, 2026

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AI · Wednesday, October 21, 2026

Homeland Security orders DeepSeek out of civilian agencies

The File desk · Oct. 21, 2026, 6:40 a.m. ET

Confirmed1 primary sources

Status

Confirmed from the Federal Register notice published Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, as read on GovInfo. The notice covers federal civilian agencies. The signed order in the appendix is an image, so a signing date inside that image is not printed here.
  • Confirmed
    The notice says the Homeland Security secretary ordered DeepSeek products excluded from federal civilian procurements and removed from civilian agency information technology.
  • Unverified
    A date the order was originally signed, and any separate rule for the Pentagon, were not readable in the notice text this desk opened.
The notice says agencies must stop buying the company's technology and must remove DeepSeek products, and tools built with it, from civilian government computers. The Department of Homeland Security published an order on Tuesday telling federal civilian agencies to drop DeepSeek.1
The notice is Federal Register document 2026-21447, published Oct. 20, 2026, on pages 66346 through 66350, docket DHS-2026-0628. It says the secretary ordered two things: excluding information technology products and services developed by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd., including affiliates, from federal civilian agency procurements, and removing DeepSeek products, affiliate products, and third-party products developed using DeepSeek from civilian agency information technology. The authority it cites is the .1
Why it matters (Estimate). Estimate. A federal civilian employee cannot keep using the DeepSeek chatbot, or a tool built on it, on a government system, and a contractor selling to those agencies has to take it out. The notice this desk could read does not say the same order applies to the Pentagon.1
A copy of the signed order is in the appendix as images, not as text this desk could read. Because of that, this story does not print a date the order was signed, and it does not describe a separate Defense Department exclusion. The notice's own words limit the action to federal civilian agencies. China's reaction was not taken from a Chinese government transcript and is not reported.1
How we know

Notes

  1. 1.Federal Register, Vol. 91, No. 201, Tuesday, October 20, 2026, pages 66346–66350, FR Doc. 2026-21447, Docket No. DHS-2026-0628. Re-opened on GovInfo for this edition. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-10-20/html/2026-21447.htm The Federal Register website itself returned an access wall. The GovInfo text says the secretary ordered “(1) excluding information technology products and services developed by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd (DeepSeek) … from federal civilian agency procurements; and, (2) removing all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations, from civilian agency information technology.” Authority: “, .” The signed order in the appendix is marked as omitted graphics. The federalregister.gov document page was not readable: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/10/20/2026-21447/notice-of-order-regarding-exclusion-and-removal-of-deepseek-products-from-federal-civilian-executive

What is still unknown or disputed

  • The signing date on the image of the order was not readable as text.
  • Whether the Defense Department is under a separate order is not in the notice text that was read.
  • A Chinese government response was not opened.

Primary sources

Every claim in this story is drawn from the documents below. If a fetch failed, that is recorded on the card.

  1. Source 1

    Notice of order excluding DeepSeek from federal civilian systems

    Federal Register, via GovInfo · October 20, 2026

    The Secretary of Homeland Security ordered exclusion of DeepSeek products from federal civilian agency procurements and removal of DeepSeek products from civilian agency information technology.

    https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-10-20/html/2026-21447.htm

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