DHS Orders Federal Civilian Agencies to Remove DeepSeek in an Order That Carries a July 24 Release Date

The Department of Homeland Security has filed a notice with the Federal Register, scheduled for publication on Tuesday, October 20, of an order that bars DeepSeek and its affiliates from federal civilian procurement and tells civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products, along with “third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations,” from their information technology. The notice was filed on Monday, October 19. CyberScoop reported it that day and The Register followed early Tuesday. The signed order sits in the notice’s appendix as page images, and its cover page gives an “Original Release Date” of July 24, 2026.

That date is 87 days before the notice was filed. The Register says DHS issued the order on Monday. CyberScoop says the notice includes a letter from Secretary Markwayne Mullin ordering the exclusion on June 26 and reads that as showing the ban “has been in place for months”; we found no June 26 date in the pages we read. The order says agencies must exclude and remove DeepSeek products “immediately after issuance” and must request any exception “within 60 days of the issuance of this order,” but it never says which date counts as issuance. Counted from July 24, the exception window closed on September 22, about four weeks before the notice was filed. Counted from this week, it runs into December.

Below: what the order requires and leaves out, how it reaches contractors, the three dates in the record and what the first public FASCSA order suggests, how far “developed using” stretches, what the order’s footnotes cite, and what to check first.

What the order requires and what it leaves out

The document is Exclusion and Removal Order #2026-01, issued under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 (FASCSA). That law lets the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting on a recommendation from the Federal Acquisition Security Council, order civilian agencies to exclude a supplier from procurements or remove its products from their systems. The order is signed by Secretary Markwayne Mullin, copies Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, and applies to civilian agencies “except for their national security systems and secure compartmented information systems,” which the Defense Department and the Director of National Intelligence cover under their own authority.

• Exclusion. Agencies must “exclude DeepSeek, DeepSeek-affiliated entities, and their products from civilian agency procurements,” “effective immediately after issuance of this Order,” including “agency-approved products lists, service provider equipment lists, e-commerce markets, and other similar functions.” A footnote says this includes “third party implementations of DeepSeek used to provide products and services” to civilian agencies.
• Removal. Agencies must “remove products provided by DeepSeek, DeepSeek-affiliated entities, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations, from civilian agency information technology systems immediately after the issuance of the Order, or seek an Exception.”
• Exceptions. An agency may ask for an exception, including one “for a delay in compliance,” by sending a written request to CISA at [email protected] “within 60 days of the issuance of this order.” The request must identify the order and the covered product, describe the exception, give a “compelling justification” and list “alternative mitigations.” CISA “will review requests for exceptions and provide a written approval or disapproval.”
• Interim steps. Until removal is complete, agencies are “encouraged” to monitor “the flow of traffic in and out of the agency,” add logging and “controls on data exfiltration,” and flag “anomalous activity.”
• CISA’s role. CISA “may provide technical assistance to agencies that are without internal capabilities sufficient to comply with this Order,” and the Secretary will review the order “within one year and annually thereafter.”

The order sets no compliance date and no reporting date; its only line on reporting is “Contact [email protected] for additional information, assistance, and reporting.” CISA’s FASCSA preparation sheet, current as of November 29, 2024, says agencies “will have reporting requirements on the exclusion or removal order through CyberScope,” but the order does not mention it. It lists no covered products, does not define “implementations,” and does not say whether copies of DeepSeek models hosted by other companies, or AI gateways that route to them, are in scope. It is also not consistent about the company’s name: the risk summary names Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd., the Federal Register summary gives Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd, and the footnote that defines an “affiliate” refers to “DeepSeek AG.”

Contractors are in the blast radius

FASCSA orders do not stop at agency networks. Under 41 CFR 201-1.303(e), an exclusion order can require agencies to keep a source out of procurements, including “from being supplied by any prime contractor and subcontractor at any tier,” and a removal order can reach a system “operated by a contractor on behalf of an agency” and, to the extent the order says so, “other contractor information systems.” This order’s removal language speaks of “civilian agency information technology systems,” and we did not find wording that extends removal to contractors’ other systems.

The contract side is FAR clause 52.204-30, in contracts that carry it. Contractors “shall not provide or use as part of the performance of the contract any covered article, or any products or services produced or provided by a source” that an applicable order prohibits, and “For all other solicitations and contracts DHS FASCSA orders apply”; solicitations from a Defense contracting office follow Defense orders instead. Contractors must search SAM.gov for the phrase “FASCSA order,” review SAM.gov “at least once every three months” during performance, and run a “reasonable inquiry” when a new order could affect their supply chain. The clause counts information technology “including cloud computing services of all types” as a covered article. When we looked, SAM.gov’s Supply Chain Orders page said its list was last updated on October 19; the list itself is a download we could not open.

Three dates, and why they matter

The order’s cover page lists the order number, an “Original Release Date: July 24, 2026” and Secretary Mullin’s signature block. The Federal Register notice says it was filed at 8:45 a.m. on October 19 and publishes on October 20. CyberScoop’s June 26 falls 28 days before July 24, and we could not reconcile the two: the published Federal Register page carries the same appendix as page images, and its first page also gives July 24. CyberScoop also describes the exception rule as a request submitted “60 days in advance,” while the order sets a deadline of “within 60 days of the issuance of this order,” which runs from issuance rather than ahead of anything. None of the documents explains the gaps, and the regulation on issuing orders leaves public disclosure to the issuing official. Under 41 CFR 201-1.303(f), the official must, on issuing an order, notify the source it names, notify the appropriate congressional committees and pass the order to the other bodies the rule lists, while whether to “provide a copy of the order to other persons, including through public disclosure,” is left to the official’s judgment.

The first public FASCSA order had the same shape. Inside Government Contracts describes the Director of National Intelligence’s September 2025 order against Acronis AG as the first public exclusion and removal order under the framework, and Mayer Brown notes that it was posted to SAM.gov on September 15, 2025 while “the Order specifies July 11, 2025, as the ‘active date.’” That is a 66-day gap. The Acronis order used a different label than the DeepSeek cover page, so we cannot say the DeepSeek order took effect on July 24. We can say that its compliance clocks all run from “issuance” and that it does not say when that was.

The order does not choose among them. If issuance was in June or July, agencies have been bound for months, as CyberScoop reads it; if it was this week, every clock has just started. Agencies that want an exception, and contractors whose agency customers are asking, can put the question to CISA’s FASCSA team, the contact both the order and the notice name.

How far “developed using” reaches

The Register called the order “unhelpfully vague and broad.” Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security, told it that “Banning DeepSeek’s own app and API is workable,” but that “The order doesn’t say what ‘developed using’ means. It could technically cover any model derived from DeepSeek and more importantly, any software whose developers used DeepSeek to write or test code.” The order gives two clues and neither settles it. The footnote on the exclusion limb reads as aimed at products that run DeepSeek models for an agency, since it says the exclusion includes “third party implementations of DeepSeek used to provide products and services.” The removal limb says “developed using DeepSeek implementations” and never defines “implementations.”

The order’s own risk summary is a better guide to what it is worried about. We set its sentences against a copy of the weights hosted by someone else, the case The Register and Moussouris raise.

Three of the four statements concern data going to DeepSeek-run servers or applications. Only the last, hedged with “may,” concerns the model itself, and the evidence that follows it is NowSecure’s February 2025 analysis of the iOS app. NowSecure’s post tells readers that “users can leverage DeepSeek’s AI model via self-hosting, hosted versions from companies like Microsoft, or simply leverage a different AI capability,” while warning that “censorship built into the model will still exist unless the model is customized.” The order does not say whether it treats those options as covered.

DeepSeek keeps publishing weights openly. The seven most recently updated model repositories on its Hugging Face account all carry an MIT license tag, and the newest, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, was created on October 17, three days before the notice’s publication date. Whether a copy of one of those models run by a US cloud, an integrator or an agency counts as one of the “third party implementations” in the footnote is the question the order leaves open.

The Register also asks about AI gateways, which the order never mentions. OpenRouter’s documentation says requests “are load balanced across the top providers to maximize uptime” by default and offers only, ignore and order fields to constrain providers; Vercel’s AI Gateway documentation says the gateway “dynamically chooses the default providers” and offers order and only under providerOptions.gateway. Those settings choose which provider serves a model that a request names. Whether a fallback list or an automatic model choice could land on a DeepSeek model is something each team has to read in its own configuration, and DeepSeek can be one backend among several in an agent tool, as in the DeepSeek, GLM and Grok pairing CrowdStrike reported in the ARTEX campaign (our post).

What the order cites, and what it leaves out

The footnotes behind the risk summary are a January 31, 2025 company profile from Exovera, DeepSeek’s privacy policy as archived on March 6, 2025, a Stanford Cyber Policy Center essay from February 5, 2025, NowSecure’s February 6, 2025 iOS analysis, an April 16, 2025 report from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, a TechTarget explainer dated August 25, 2025 and a December 22, 2020 DHS business advisory on firms linked to the PRC. The newest is dated August 25, 2025. The notice says the Secretary acted “following review of the Federal Acquisition Security Council Recommendation and affiliated evidence,” and we found no public copy of that recommendation.

NIST’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) published an evaluation of DeepSeek models on September 30, 2025, about five weeks after the newest footnote’s date. It found that agents based on DeepSeek’s most secure model (R1-0528) “were, on average, 12 times more likely than evaluated U.S. frontier models to follow malicious instructions designed to derail them from user tasks,” and that R1-0528 “responded to 94% of overtly malicious requests when a common jailbreaking technique was used, compared with 8% of requests for U.S. reference models.” The Register links that evaluation; the order’s footnotes do not. The models named in that summary are R1-0528 and V3.1, not the V4-series models now on Hugging Face, so the tests would not settle the question either. The point is that the order’s one model-level sentence is hedged with “may” and cites no model test.

The order covers DeepSeek alone. CyberScoop notes that it is the only Chinese AI model the order names, though Moonshot AI (Kimi) and Alibaba (Qwen) are among other Chinese open-weight developers that have worried officials or been accused of distilling US models. The September 8 advisory from CISA, the NSA and the FBI named six Chinese AI companies, DeepSeek among them, for large-scale distillation of American models (our post). That advisory was about extraction from US models rather than the security of the Chinese models, so the two documents do different jobs. The route is also executive rather than legislative: The Register says the No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act, introduced on February 6, 2025, “never made it out of committee,” while the Defense Information Systems Agency began blocking DeepSeek on Pentagon networks in January 2025 and the Navy, NASA and the House of Representatives took similar steps.

What to check first

1. Agencies. Ask CISA which date starts the exception clock (July 24 on the order’s cover, June 26 in CyberScoop’s account, or the notice itself), then list every DeepSeek touchpoint: the app, API keys, hosted copies bought through other vendors and products that embed it. If you need an exception or a delay, the order wants a written request with its five items. The interim steps it encourages (traffic monitoring, logging, exfiltration controls) apply while removal is under way.
2. Contractors to civilian agencies. Check whether your contracts carry FAR 52.204-30, look up the order on SAM.gov, and keep a record of the “reasonable inquiry” the clause calls for. Ask your contracting officer how the order treats US-hosted copies and tools built with DeepSeek’s help, and write down the answer.
3. Teams shipping AI features to agencies. Search code, configuration files, container images and model registries for DeepSeek model names, including distilled and fine-tuned derivatives, and read your gateway’s fallback and routing settings instead of assuming the default keeps DeepSeek out of the path.
4. Watch for clarification. At about 10:20 UTC on October 20 we could not find a DHS or CISA page for the order. CyberScoop said it had asked CISA and DHS for details, and The Register said a DHS spokesperson had not immediately responded to its request for comment.

Sources and method

The Federal Register PDF holds the signed order as page images, so we read it from those images and checked each quotation against our own transcription; the published Federal Register page carries the appendix as four page images, and we compared the first with the PDF. The notice text is in the public inspection PDF and on the Federal Register page. Rule and clause text is from 41 CFR 201-1.303, 41 CFR 201-1.304 and FAR 52.204-30. The other sources are CyberScoop’s report by Derek B. Johnson, The Register’s report by Thomas Claburn, the CISA preparation sheet, SAM.gov, Inside Government Contracts, Mayer Brown, NowSecure, NIST, the OpenRouter and Vercel documentation, the Hugging Face API listing for the deepseek-ai account (queried on October 20) and the LaHood release. The day counts are ours: 87 days from July 24 to October 19, 66 days from July 11 to September 15, 2025, and 60-day windows counted as calendar days, which the order does not specify. We did not contact DHS or CISA, we could not open the SAM.gov list, and the regulations.gov docket named in the notice returned no documents when we queried it.